


Falling

by Evandar



Series: And The Stars Fell [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Consensual Underage Sex, Dark Bill Denbrough, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Domestic Violence, Don't copy to another site, Eldritch Abomination Pennywise, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Other, Pennywise (IT) in Love, Possessive Pennywise (IT), Psychic Abilities, Soul Bond, Tentacle Sex, Underage Kissing, Weird Biology, Weird fiction, What is this morality you speak of?, Xenophilia, Zach Denbrough's A+ Parenting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2020-10-24 08:28:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20702951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/pseuds/Evandar
Summary: When Georgie tells him about meeting the clown in the sewer, Bill starts to remember their encounter the year before.





	1. Reunion

**Author's Note:**

> Oops, I continued it.
> 
> Probably very slow-updating.

He’d forgotten. He’d forgotten about the clown, about what really happened to Bowers, Belch, and Criss. He’d forgotten about the sewers and the scar that’s still on his arm, about the smell of blood and grey water, about the shape in the dark that riffled through his thoughts and promised not to eat him. He’d forgotten, but he hadn’t at the same time. He’d dreamed of mad, piping music and dancing lights. He’d dreamed of a voice that echoed in his mind and made his ears bleed onto his pillowcase. 

He didn’t realise that it was all connected until Georgie told him about the clown in the sewer, until he’d heard the invitation. He didn’t realise that he was _going_ to visit until his feet brought him here, to where the sewers pour out into the Kenduskeag. He stares into the dark, filthy water washing over his shoes, and tries not to breathe too deeply. He can remember, now, the twists and turns that will take him to the clown’s lair - _a left, a downward slope, two rights, a left, and two more rights_ \- and the tower of trash and the dark, musty sanctuary of the trailer at its base. His hands are shaking. His heart is in his throat. He’s already walking into the dank, stinking darkness.

It's been raining recently. The water is up to his knees, and it sinks cold into his jeans, weighing his steps and filling his shoes. He doesn’t stop walking.

“H-he th-thrusts his fists,” he whispers, “against the p-p-posts, a-and s-suh-still insuh-sists h-he suh-suh-hees th-the g-g-ghosts.”

Ghosts. There are ghosts here, now, in the sewer. (There always were.) On the edge of his hearing, he can hear Bowers and his gang. Their shouts and their laughter. Hyena-humour.

He still doesn’t know what the clown is. Not human, certainly – not anything like human. But he does know that this is dangerous, probably stupid. Just because he survived the first time, it doesn’t mean that he’ll live through a second meeting. He can remember, now, the blood spiralling through the water, the crunch-snap of Bowers’ fingers, and the eerie smile painted red with gore. (His mind still shies away from the spider-creature it had unfolded into once back in its trailer.) The clown killed them. It _ate_ them. It let Bill go because he’d led them there and made them into an offering.

None of that matters. He still wants to see it. He _needs_ to see it.

He edges down the slope, keeping his balance with one hand on the sewer wall. He turns right and right again, left, and right, and right, and the sewer opens up in front of him. The tower of junk looms; at its base, Bowers’ knife still sticks out of an abandoned teddy bear; at its summit, a body floats. What’s left of one: it’s missing limbs.

But there’s a bigger problem than the dead body. That, at least, doesn’t seem quite real from where Bill’s standing: the missing parts have turned it into some kind of abstract. 

The problem is, Bill’s alone. 

The prickling sensation that he remembers from last time is absent. Bill walks around the tower, sloshing through the filthy water, but aside from the corpse over his head and the tower of junk, there’s no sign of the clown at all. Nothing. The sense of being watched is gone; there’s no pressure in his skull as it pushes in on his mind. He heads towards the trailer but pauses. 

He knows, with a sinking finality, that it isn’t in there, either. 

He leaves. He’s disappointed and relieved all at once, but by the time he’s stepped blinking into the sunlight – soaking wet and stinking – the disappointment has won.

(He remembers the weight of a hand on his shoulder and the sharp slice of a barbed leg into his back.)

He cycles back home, makes up a story about falling into the Kenduskeag when his mother wrinkles her nose at the smell and the state of his clothes. He showers and, curious, when he’s done he turns his back to the mirror and peers at himself over his shoulder. He leans back, twisting and shifting until the silvery line of a healed scar catches the light. It’s small, a fine line that runs parallel to his spine, just under the sharp wing of his left shoulder blade. 

His heart pounds in his chest. After everything, he can't quite believe that the scar is actually there; he twists his arm behind his back to touch it, and gives a soft, shuddering breath when he feels the slight ridge of raised skin. It's real. He's _glad_ it's real, awful as it is.  
…

_Betty Ripsom is reported missing._

…

It’s the prickling sensation of being watched that wakes him. Bill’s eyes snap open, and at first he doesn’t see anything except the usual shadows on his bedroom wall. He sees nothing, right up until something cold and thick drips on his face. He grimaces, looking up at the ceiling only to find two pin-pricks of blue light hanging over him. He jerks back, flails. His heart is pounding right up in his throat and his instinctive scream comes out more as a choked squeak.

The clown giggles, high and wicked. Fear slides like ice down his spine even as he struggles to get his breathing under control. He reaches up to brush – drool? Cold blood? – off his cheek and his fingertips brush against faded pompoms. The clown hasn’t pulled away at all during his struggles. It’s looming over him, too close in the dark, and Bill can feel the weight of it pushing the mattress down on either side of his hips. 

He’s not scared, not anymore, but his heart is still racing.

“H-hi,” he whispers. 

“Hiya Billy.” 

The reply is soft, spoken in that same high, lilting voice that Bill remembers finding so odd the first time he heard it. The clown’s breath is cool on his face, rank with the copper stench of blood. Bill recoils instinctively; something cold drips onto his face again, sliding wet from the corner of his mouth across his cheek. He has no idea if it’s blood or drool, and when he licks his lips, the taste doesn’t leave him any wiser. What it _does_ do is send another shiver down his spine when he realises what he’s done.

The clown titters. It shifts, looms closer; the glow of its eyes blue and eerie, and Bill – staring up at them – can see the same lights that he sees in his dreams sometimes, flickering and dancing behind the clown’s irises. 

(There’s a flash of something in the back of his mind, a thought that isn’t his own: dark, ovoid pillars bathed in dancing light; loneliness and _hunger_; a vast shape that could be a turtle in the same way the clown is <strike>not</strike> really a spider, stars and gas spewing from its gaping maw. They are things he has seen before in half-remembered dreams: death and life and destruction and…)

(Oh.)

He pushes himself up, half-sitting. He can feel his heart still racing, and there’s a squirming in his belly that has nothing to do with the reek of the clown’s breath. 

He’s only ever kissed Beverly Marsh: a tiny peck in a school play. Other than that, he’s only seen them in movies, or in glimpses snatched of older teens or his parents. They always seemed less wet than this; less filled with teeth and the taste of gore. A whine slips from his throat and he presses deeper into it, his lips parting under the pressure. The clown’s thick lower lip presses against his teeth and he bites. He feels the answering growl down to his core.

It’s only when the clown pulls away that he realises that he’s crying; that his cock is achingly hard in his pyjamas, and that a long, clawed hand is gripping hard at his shoulder. He stumbles over alien syllables – the name he knows from his dreams, but that he couldn’t have said even without the stammer – and a giggle slips into the gap between them.

“Oh, you can call me Pennywise,” it says. “Pennywise the Dancing Clown.”


	2. Tempo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second chapters are hard, guys. _But_. The sheer thirst in the comments is pretty inspiring.
> 
> I'm trying to make sure I update relatively regularly. Since I'm working full time and doing a PhD, I figured every couple of weeks wouldn't be unreasonable.

Bill has always known things he shouldn’t. He knows about the affair his father had before Georgie was born. He knows about the refrigerator unit in the junk yard - the one that Patrick Hockstetter filled with the bodies of animals, skinned and dismembered. He knows about the things that Richie and Eddie do when they slope off together, the nervous kisses and exploring hands. It’s something he’s always done: looked at people and _known_. 

He knows other things now, too. 

There’s an awareness now that hadn’t been there before. The day he’d woken up with blood and saliva smeared across his mouth, he’d started to see things that he had never been able to before: ghosts flickering at the edges of his vision; buildings restored to former glory when they had been crumbling the day before; he can feel Pennywise’s consciousness sliding across his own. He knows the taste of human blood and the feeling of sharp teeth against his tongue. 

He rests his head against the cool surface of his desk and closes his eyes.

His dreams these days are filled with dancing light and strange shadows that shift and change in time with piping music. He knows that it’s connected to Pennywise and its visits at night, to the kisses they share in the dark, but he doesn’t know _how_ \- not exactly. He knows that he’s been told, but the memories of what was said are just out of reach. He’s so _close_, and he _tries_, but…

“Mr Denbrough!”

He jerks up, blinking rapidly as his classmates giggle. “Ss-ss-suh-soh-rry,” he says, but Mr Hannigan is already turning away. Even so, Bill catches the roll of his eyes, and he grits his teeth as his cheeks burn.

As tired as the dreams and the night-time visits are leaving him, he misses Pennywise during the day. He misses the lack of mockery. He misses being taken seriously and listened to, no matter how much he stumbles over words and sentences. He’s started to realise, even, that he’s stammering less and less around Pennywise. That being listened to is _helping_.

He balances his chin in his hand and looks down at his notes, scrawled and almost incomprehensible. He sighs. He lets his eyes drift closed again. 

…

_Dorsey Corcoran is found dead, his skull caved in and his blood and brains spattered across his bedroom wall. His father’s fingerprints are smeared in red on the handle of his best hammer._

_Eddie Corcoran is reported missing. But his father is already in custody, and even though he pleads innocence over his second child, the police don’t bother looking._

…

Halloween in Derry, Bill supposes, is a lot like Halloween in most of small-town America. Carved pumpkins are placed in beds of straw, piled in the corners of porches and on steps. The trees turn red and russet, leaves drifting to lay in the gutters, leaving skeletal branches to stretch up towards cloud-laden sky.

Georgie is excited. He’s _always_ excited, but the promise of costumes and candy means that there’s a steady stream of chatter in the house.

(He hasn’t asked about Pennywise since the day he told Bill that the clown had woken up. Bill hopes – knows – that Pennywise has been kind in allowing Georgie to forget.)

Georgie wants to be a superhero. He wants to be a ninja turtle. He wants to be a pirate and a vampire and a zombie and an astronaut. Bill stays quiet and lets his parents navigate the logistics of sticking tin foil to cardboard and curbing Georgie’s more outlandish ideas. He already knows that he’s going to be the one stuck taking Georgie from house to house so that he can fill his plastic bucket.

He lets his focus drift – past Georgie’s excitement, past his father’s boredom (and his thoughts about the receptionist at work), past his mother’s resigned suspicion – and lets his gaze slide out of focus until grey gathers in his peripherals. He exhales slowly; breathes in deep as leaves curl in the autumn breeze, dancing against the window pane. He watches as their red darkens, smears, paints into a familiar, eerie smile. 

His heart skips. He slips back into himself and returns his attention back to his dinner, but his belly is in knots with sudden anticipation and his appetite gone. His hand shakes so much that he has to set his fork down. 

His mother glances at him, an odd look in her eyes. He’s not sure what she sees, but she smiles – faint – and looks back at his brother. But Georgie too has been distracted.

“What’re you dressing as, Billy?” he asks. “You have to dress up too.”

“I, ah.” He looks back up at the window. The smears and the smiles are gone; a single red leaf clings to the edge of the frame. “A c-clown,” he says. “Uh-I’ll b-be a c-c-clown.”

…

Pennywise leans over him, straddling his hips, with traces of gore still painting the corners of its smile and a soft “hiya Billy” to announce its presence – as if Bill hasn’t felt it watching him since dinner.

He reaches up, traces the line of a red marking down the length of Pennywise’s face down to its dripping mouth. In a flash he remembers fingers snapping and oozing between too-many teeth, and he lets his touch skate the edges of Pennywise’s lower lip.

“Hi,” he replies. “I mm-missed you.”

Pennywise giggles, leans closer, and accepts the blood-saturated kiss. He doesn’t know which of the missing kids it was today; the posters are building up on walls and telephone poles, beginning to layer over each other. He doesn’t quite care. He _likes_ it – likes that Pennywise likes it. He moans softly as teeth scrape over his skin and he touches his tongue to their sharp edges. His hand slides back up to card through copper hair, and as his body starts to react, he feels Pennywise shift on top of him.

There’s still pyjamas and a duvet between them, but the sensation still makes him gasp. He pushes his hips up – hears and feels as Pennywise release a soft, hissing breath between them. A clawed hand wraps around his shoulder, holding him steady as Pennywise presses down harder onto him, driving the air from Bill’s lungs and sending pleasure shooting up his spine.

(He thinks, briefly, of the magazines Richie stole from his dad’s office one day – of bronzed women with their legs apart, their hands cupped over their rounded breasts. He remembers the hot flush of confused embarrassment, not knowing where to look.

He doesn’t feel embarrassed now. Not with Pennywise. Never with Pennywise.)

He thrusts up to meet Pennywise’s every slow, downward grind. He pants into the spaces between kisses, nipping and sucking at Pennywise’s lip in a way that he knows the clown likes – knows because he can _feel it_, skirting against the edges of his own pleasure – and tugging at copper hair. Pennywise growls when Bill comes, spilling hot into his pyjamas. It breaks their kiss and ducks its head lower, tracing its red-painted nose along the length of Bill’s neck and making him shudder.

…

“Is she pretty?” his mother asks him. He’s in the kitchen, sipping coffee with too much sugar and trying to stay awake as he waits for his sheets and his pyjamas to finish drying. He’d managed to get the blood out after the second wash. The come, too. 

He blinks up at her as she helps herself to a cup of coffee from the pot. “Wuh-wh-huh?”

“The girl you like,” she says. She brushes her hand over his hair, and he can’t stop himself from jumping at the contact. Her touches are so much gentler than Pennywise’s – the clown always grips him hard and pulls him close – and he can’t remember the last time his mother touched him so casually.

Before his dad’s latest affair started, he thinks.

“The one you keep drifting off and thinking about,” she continues, pretending like she didn’t notice Bill’s flinch. There’s a wistfulness in her voice that makes him feel sad, in a way. 

He doesn’t want to think about it. He thinks about the question instead, of the bright copper of Pennywise’s hair, and the way the deadlights dance in its eyes and behind its teeth. The way it teases but doesn’t mock, the way it plays and kisses and looks at Bill when it thinks he doesn’t know, and – 

“Yeah,” he says. “I-uh-sh-she’s p-pretty.”

(She? It? He? What?)

“You going to ask her out?” his mother asks.

“Ah-I-uh, I d-did,” he says. It’s a lie, but only because they seem to have skipped that step between the death and the dreams and the night-time visits. “Sh-she s-said yes.”

(_She?_)


	3. Halloween

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's your porn, you thirsty bastards. Please read the updated tags before continuing.
> 
> On a side note, I have one more scheduled update before I go on holiday for a month. I do have the option of taking a laptop with me, but I don't know if I'll be able to stick to my fortnightly schedule with any degree of success. So! Do I a) try this and take a laptop on holiday, or b) update two chapters and a side-story in two weeks time and then go on holiday guilt-free. Opinions please!
> 
> And yes, I did say side-story. Thanks to a review from penni_saur on the last chapter, I'm going to be writing a collection of outtakes and AUs. If you have any ideas, feel free to suggest them!

The costume isn’t right. He hadn’t been able to find anything white or grey or vaguely Elizabethan in style. There’s no starched ruff around his neck, no fitted doublet or stockings. Instead he’s in bright, clashing colours: yellow dungarees with candy corn orange pompoms down the front, a purple and green striped shirt with a frilled collar and puffed out sleeves, and cartoonish red shoes. He looks gaudy, compared to the image he’d had in his head when he’d made his suggestion. But then again, he knows that Pennywise doesn’t want to look like a proper clown so much as one that might star in a horror movie. It wants to _frighten_. 

(_Fear seasons the meat._)

Still, even though the costume is wrong, he can get the makeup right. 

He dabs white greasepaint over his face and neck, and with careful brushstrokes he daubs his nose and lips with scarlet. He keeps his hand as steady as possible as he draws lines up the length of his face, curving from the corners of his lips to slash through his eyes like the markings of a cheetah. 

He still doesn’t look quite right. His mouth is thinner and his cheekbones aren’t high enough, and the paint makes his eyes look even greener rather than blue or (rarer) orange. But. His homage, he supposes, will do. 

Georgie gives him a strange look when he comes downstairs, treading carefully in his oversized shoes. It’s a wide-eyed look, slightly panicked and confused. He looks like Bill reminds him of something, and a gentle brush against Georgie’s mind brings a memory of rain and a queasy, uncertain feeling of creeping fear; the smell of sewage and popcorn. 

(Pennywise let him forget, but there’s a part of Georgie that never really will; a part that knows he was lucky to be allowed to live.)

Bill smiles at him, wide and bright, and he ignores the reflexive scowl when he ruffles Georgie’s hair before grabbing his own bucket for candy. Just because he’s a bit old for trick-or-treating, it doesn’t mean he can’t enjoy the spoils. Georgie grumbles behind his back as he pulls on his pirate hat, and their mother swoops it, setting it at a rakish angle and promising Georgie that he’s the most terrifying pirate in all of Maine. 

She glances at Bill, at his makeup, and that odd expression flickers over her face too. 

(She was small, twenty-seven years ago. Younger than Georgie is now. But children disappeared then, too, until the Black Spot burned down. 

The bodies were never found, were they?)

“Keep an eye on him, Bill,” she says. “And both of you stay safe.”

“Y-yeah, Mm-om,” Bill promises. 

Georgie will be safe with him. They’ll be the safest people in all of Derry. He knows that Pennywise will be out tonight, hunting amongst the throngs of children – luring them away into the dark, dank of the sewer. Bill, and those he keeps with him, are the only exceptions: Pennywise has promised him that much, oddly determined to not cause Bill any pain.

(_Billy won’t always be so attached to the food-humans._)

...

_The faces of the other children will stay with him forever. The looks he gets as he passes them, Georgie’s hand held firmly in his own. He doesn’t look like Pennywise, but the paint on his face is familiar to so many of them. _

_So, so many. _

_He takes Georgie from house to house, their buckets filling with every knock, and he smiles._

...

It’s the middle of the night when Bill slides out of bed. He can’t sleep. He’s been tossing and turning for what feels like hours, waiting unsatisfied. He sheds his pyjamas and redresses, not in his bright costume, but in darker clothes. He’s already wiped the greasepaint from his face and neck, carefully removed all traces of it from behind his ears and under his jaw. He’s himself again, tired and frustrated at his inability to rest, and lonely. So lonely and so certain that his loneliness isn’t entirely his own.

Georgie is asleep across the hall, crashed out after his sugar high. Their parents are in bed, and when he strains his ears, he can hear his father’s soft snores. Outside, the trick-or-treaters are gone, chased home by the rain. The streets are empty, streetlights shining slick on the wet asphalt. Bill makes his way downstairs, listening closely for any change; there is none. It’s a relief. He needs, with every fibre of his being, to leave the house and go to Pennywise, but he doesn’t want to face the consequences if his parents (his father) ever discover he snuck out in the middle of the night.

The threat is there, but it’s not enough to stop him. He grabs his shoes and his jacket and the spare key, and he slips from the back door into the night. 

His heart is pounding. He looks back up at his house, at the dark windows. No sign of life. 

He’d spotted Pennywise twice while he was out with Georgie. Once, he caught a glimpse of copper hair and bright eyes shining from a storm drain. The second time, it had been standing under the eaves of a house, gaze red and predatory as it studied a group of girls dressed as fairies and princesses. Two sightings, and a constant nudging at the edges of his awareness. 

(_Hunger. Prey. Eat. _

_Mate?_

_No. Mate is having fun._)

He had thought that Pennywise would come to see him as it always does. It hasn’t. It hasn’t come to him at all tonight. It hasn’t loomed over him in the dark and pressed dripping wet kisses to his lips. It hasn’t spoken to him, hasn’t run claw-tipped fingers through his hair. It hasn’t - 

Bill misses it. He wants it, _craves_ it. He wants to see it and hold it and kiss it - just _wants_ it - and he knows that he won’t be able to sleep without it. Not anymore. 

He grabs Silver from its spot by the garage and swings his leg over the seat, letting instincts take over. He has no idea where he’s going, but he can feel Pennywise’s presence in the back of his mind, pulling him in. He doesn’t look back again; pedals fast, instead, and resists the urge to whoop as he usually does when he picks up speed. 

He doesn’t want to draw attention to himself. At least, not the attention of humans. 

Derry blurs past him, dark and lonely, until that guiding instinct screams to _stop_ so loudly that he almost falls off his bike. 

He looks around wildly, until his eyes settle on the Niebolt house. 

It looks terrible in the daytime, rotting on its foundations, surrounded by dead grass scattered with broken glass. It’s even more unappealing in the dark, looking for all the world like a haunted house from a low-budget horror movie. It’s a wreck, unwelcoming and dangerous. The homeless people who ride the trainline that runs behind it are supposed to sleep in there sometimes, according to his parents, but Bill doubts it. He doubts because he can sense Pennywise all over the house like a miasma. _It_ is here, and Bill knows what it does to intruders, even when it would rather be sleeping. 

There’s a creak. The shadows on the sagging porch deepen as the front door swings open. Bill swallows. He dismounts Silver and wheels the bike up the garden path, struggling against choking weeds. He discards his bike in the long grass and takes the stairs two at a time. They’re oddly sturdy under his feet, creaking only a little and not giving way. 

He runs inside, into the dark, closing the door behind him. 

...

_Three trick-or-treaters never came home: Veronica Grogan, Cheryl Lamonica and Esther Sinclair. _

_They’re floating, still dressed as fairy-princesses._

_Their parents are hysterical. Tomorrow, a curfew will be announced. It won’t be enough. _

...

The air inside the house is thick with the smell of decay. It smells like Pennywise, he thinks, and feels some of the tension in his body relax. It feels like home. 

His eyes adjust slowly to the darkness. He finds furniture in the shadows, doorways and stairs. He explores, near-blind, knowing that Pennywise knows he’s here. The clown does not appear. 

(The prickling sensation of being watched. He didn’t feel it earlier, with Georgie, but he wonders now if his attempt at mimicry has been taken as an insult.)

He finds Pennywise when he’s on his second stumbling circuit of the house. It’s a tall shadow lurking in the dark of the doorway leading to the cellar; blue eyes glowing like stars. Bill’s breath freezes in his throat, but Pennywise’s eyes are _blue_ and there’s a brush against his mind that feels almost like happiness and - 

He crosses the room, his steps suddenly confident, and reaches out. His fingers curl in the stiff fabric of Pennywise’s ruff and he tugs downward; Pennywise comes willingly, accepting Bill’s kiss and raising its hands to clasp his shoulders and the back of his neck. 

“I mmmissed you,” Bill whispers, and the sound of his voice surprises him. He barely stutters. He sounds older, darker somehow; his voice deeper than it should be. 

Pennywise doesn’t respond except to kiss him again, its tongue pressing into his mouth - suffocating thick and wet and metallic with the taste of blood. Its claws dig sharp into his shoulders, its grip growing tighter. Bill whines softly, kissing back as much as he can; clutching back just as tightly as his tongue traces along row after row after row of razor-sharp teeth. 

He’s not quite aware of being guided backwards before his knees hit the edge of the ancient sofa. Pennywise shoves him down onto the lumpy cushions without ceremony, eliciting an alarming creak from the furniture. It doesn’t, by some miracle, collapse, and Pennywise clambers on top of him, straddling his hips as it usually does. The familiar position sends heat spiralling through Bill’s gut. He’s already hard in his jeans, aching and eager. He’s panting against Pennywise’s mouth, arching up as clawed hands skate down the length of his torso.

He should feel afraid. Those hands can dismember a body in a matter of seconds. He doesn’t: he trusts it not to. 

He lets own hands wander, desperately seeking more. More contact, more of that cold, oddly hard flesh. More everything. He knows that Pennywise can make itself appear however it likes; doesn’t even know if Pennywise is male or female or something in between. 

(_She, but not. She, but beyond. Human boundaries cannot be applied._

_It. _)

There isn’t a duvet between them this time. Just clothes that suddenly feel a size too small. Bill squirms, bucks up. He wants more. 

(_Lesser beings require so much contact with each other. Smaller gods fight and mate while slaughtering each other across the turtle’s spewed universes. Humans fight and fuck and touch so much, like the petty creatures they are, but this -_)

Claws catch in the fastenings of Bill’s jeans. He gasps at the touch, the sudden pressure, his head tilting back as Pennywise guides his erection out, careful not to slice him open. Pennywise’s skin is hard and cold and slightly chitinous, like the legs of a spider. Bill feels old-fashioned clothing fade to nothing under his grasp, and he flexes his fingers against its suddenly bare hips as it hovers over him, one hand wrapped around his cock. 

It pauses. The hesitation feels heavy somehow.

He looks up into blazing blue eyes and on the edge of his senses, he hears the piping music from the dreams they share together. 

“Wh-what are yuh-you w-wuh-aiting for?” he asks. 

He can feel it riffling through his mind, though what it’s looking for, it doesn’t let on. Then, slowly, it releases its grip on his cock, only for something else to replace its fingers. Something long and cold and wet - not unlike its tongue - that winds around him from tip to root. He jumps, looks down, but can’t see anything in the shadows between them. Pennywise settles onto him, shifting slightly as the strange appendage begins to ripple along Bill’s length, squeezing and stroking. Milking him. He gasps, throwing back his head and pushing up, hands scrabbling at Pennywise’s hips. 

Pennywise hisses softly, shifting against him, taking him deeper. It _flexes_ around him. Pleasure curls at the base of his spine. He thrusts up. It feels so - 

(_Good. Maybe this is why humans spend so much time doing this._)

He doesn’t last. He _can’t_ last. He wants to cry when he comes, because it’s _over_; he can feel heat crawling up his neck and his cheeks as his eyes sting. He presses his face into Pennywise’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of blood and mould and cotton-candy. Claws scratch at his scalp - gentle. Kind, almost. 

(_Strange little human-dreamer. Why should it be angry that the purpose of this act has been served?_)

Bill manages not to cry. He can’t actually bring himself to, not when he can feel nothing but satisfaction and smugness from the being in his lap. He lets himself relax instead, pressing kisses to exposed skin and running the tip of his nose along the exposed part of Pennywise’s throat, above the ruff and below its ear. There’s a pleased sound from above him - almost a purr - and he reaches up to draw Pennywise down into another kiss. 

He’s still inside of it. Every so often, Pennywise ripples around him, setting pleasure-pain sparking at the base of his spine. 

“Wuh-why d-didn’t you visit?” he asks. 

“You wanted to have fun with your _brother_,” Pennywise says, and there’s a note of jealousy in its voice. It doesn’t understand. It _hates_ \- that much is clear from the venom in its tone and the lightning flash thought of the <strike>not</strike> turtle. It accompanies its words with another flexing movement around Bill’s cock and he gasps. He jolts up, pushing deeper. He’s hard again and it hurts a little, but it feels so good. 

He kisses the corner of Pennywise’s mouth. “I suh-still w-wuh-wan-t you,” he says. “All the time. I-“

He’s cut off when Pennywise clamps down on him, rocking its hips and stealing the words from his tongue with a kiss. He shoves his thoughts towards Pennywise instead, the mad jumble of thoughts and feelings that have been taking him over. 

His second orgasm aches beautifully. He’s left dizzy and breathless, boneless. He looks up into star-like eyes, ancient and beyond knowing. He’s exhausted, on the edge of sleep when he feels the nudge back. Thoughts too vast to fully comprehend; emotions both familiar and alien. A sense of importance. 

He understands. 

Overwhelmed and exhausted, he sleeps.

...

_He sees the deadlights; hears their music. He dreams of wandering through their dancing lights and the flickering shadows they cast. _

_He dreams of strange, ovoid pillars again. They tower over him as he walks through their jumbled cloisters, mindful of the long spider-like legs that so carefully arrange them._

...

He wakes alone, cold and curled up on a tattered green sofa. He’s roused by pale yellow light slanting through filthy windows and an aching hunger in his belly. Around him, the house is silent, just as sinister in the morning light as it had looked in the dark. He stretches, tucks his limp cock back into his jeans and lets his gaze drift over the moth-eaten furniture and the patterns of his own footprints winding through decades of dust.

He’s never felt more at home, and it takes him a moment to realise why: radiating from under the ground, he can feel Pennywise’s glee.


	4. Losers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You've all been so lovely about me vanishing for, like, all of November. Have an early chapter!

“Is that Betty Ripsom’s mom?”

Bill looks up, squints through the bright summer sunlight, and spots her. She looks terrible. Pale and haunted, with her hair in wild tangles around her face. She’s still in her slippers, he realises, and there are tears tracking down her cheeks. There’s…no guilt, when he looks at her. Not even the tiniest twinge of it. There should be, but knowing that isn’t enough to make him consider approaching and telling her what really happened to her daughter – especially when she’s surrounded by the police. No one has been linked to the missing children, yet, and they’re hoping to see something today. To catch a hint of something suspicious. 

They won’t. 

He watches as Mrs Ripsom scans the crowd, searching for her daughter; her hands are clasped under her chin, her eyes wide and frantic. He can feel her fear from here, the faint strand of her hope, and he tastes the echo of blood on his tongue. 

“What’s she doing here? Does she think Betty’s going to turn up for the last day?”

Bill shrugs, shakes his head and turns away. He gathers with his friends and empties his backpack into the bin with a feeling of relief. School is over and with it, his punishment. 

He had known on Halloween that sneaking out would have consequences if he was caught. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep in the sofa in the Niebolt house; hadn’t meant to arrive home after the sun had risen. He’d found his mother frantic and Georgie teary-eyed. His father, white with fury, had loomed over him as soon as he’d set foot in the door, and the second that his fist had landed on Bill’s face, he’d known that his father was going to die. 

Pennywise hasn’t done it yet. Even though months have passed and the icy silence between Bill and his father has grown, Pennywise still hasn’t acted against him. 

(_Oh, there’s a plan for him, Billy. He’s going to suffer. Suffer and burn for touching you ._)

“Are we still going to the Barrens tomorrow, or are you still grounded?” Stan asks. 

“For being a dumbass and wandering around at night while a serial killer’s in the loose,” Richie adds. 

Bill punches him lightly on the arm, rolling his eyes. “I sh-should b-be okay to g-go out,” he says. 

After his father had let up with his fists, he’d grounded Bill for the rest of the school year. Every evening, every weekend since, he’s spent in his room, watching the seasons change through his window. He hasn’t been as lonely as he should have been: the Losers are loyal friends, and Pennywise has been with him every night, in his head and his bed. 

“About time,” Richie says. 

“You’re lucky you just got grounded,” Eddie says - not for the first time. “Mom would have killed me if I snuck out like that. Have you any idea how much danger -“

Bill tunes out the rest of the lecture, focuses instead on the rush of Eddie’s thoughts. He’s wishing he was brave enough to sneak out, away from his mother’s control, and visit Richie in the dark; there’s a flash of him throwing pebbles at a curtained window, climbing the trellis on the outside of the Tosier house, kisses. Bill smiles. His friends are adorable, even if they aren’t brave enough to tell the world their secret. There’s a tiny part of him wishes he and Pennywise could be so sweet in their togetherness, impossible as it is. 

(_It is?_)

As much as Bill loves it, there is no innocence about their relationship. There never has been. There’s too much blood in their kisses, too much death, for them to have something like Richie and Eddie do. 

(_We’re **better**._) 

As wistful as he is sometimes, Bill wouldn’t change a thing.

He cycles straight home for the last time, basking in the afternoon sunlight and the excitement of summer. 

...

He waits in the living room for his parents’ verdict. As far as they’ve been aware, he’s been amply punished: isolated from everyone for months on end. Still, his father glowers at him over the beer bottle in his fist. His mother is twisting her wedding ring around her finger, her mouth an unhappy line; she’s comparing her husband to the man she married. Bill’s father, in the other hand, is wallowing in dislike and resentment.

(His secretary is having a baby. His father wishes she wasn’t.)

Bill watches back, unmoving and unmoved by his father’s distaste. It’s nothing unusual, and he’s come to expect it. 

“It’s been months, Zach,” his mother says. “He’s been good as gold. His grades have improved. Let him enjoy his summer.”

Her mind flashes briefly to the conversation they’d had before Halloween, of Bill’s ‘girlfriend.’ He hasn’t mentioned any girl since and his mother wonders if his punishment has been the death of his first romance. Bill can’t tell her it’s the opposite: almost a year without anything but school to distract him from Pennywise and its company has been...good. For them. 

“Fine,” his father says. “Break the rules one more time...” He lets the threat go unsaid, and Bill nods. 

(_Just a little longer, Billy, and he’ll regret it. He won’t survive touching you._)

“Thuh-thank yuh-you,” he says. 

His father rolls his eyes like he always does, and Bill hopes viciously that Pennywise will eat them; will pluck them from his skull with long claws and pop them like candy between its teeth. 

(_Yes._)

He escapes to his room, his freedom in the morning assured. 

...

The sun prickles on his skin, and Bill turns his face up to it. He and Stan, Eddie and Richie are out in the Barrens, the beginnings of a childish dam crossing the Kenduskeag. It keeps bursting, sending cold water rushing over their legs and feet. Further downstream, the sewer entrance where Bill once hid from Bowers and his gang spills sewage into the clear water. It stinks, even from where they’re playing, but under the rancid stench, Bill can pick up the familiar copper-sweet smell of blood and candy corn. It makes him smile as much as the freedom does, and when they eventually abandon their dam and flop back onto the grass, he looks longingly down at that shadowy pipe. 

There’s no point in going closer. Pennywise is hunting, its hunger a familiar ache along the edges of Bill’s senses. 

(_The fat boy is reading, leaning over a book of Old Derry. It remembers eating the author. The fat boy flicks through the pages, skimming over photographs, and his fear begins to rise - seasoning the plentiful meat on his bones. _

_So much meat, this one. So much - and Billy hasn’t claimed this human as one of his._)

Bill blinks away images of a blond head bent over stacks of books, and silently wishes Pennywise luck on its hunt. He turns his head to watch Eddie puff at his inhaler, snarling insults at Richie in between breaths. Richie is laughing, and there’s a bunch of fronded grass stems clutched between his fingers. Eddie’s allergies are odd in that they only ever seem to manifest in his own head, but only Richie ever dares to taunt him with them. He’s the only one Eddie allows close enough to do it. 

Next to them, Stan is ignoring the chaos and is making a note in his birdwatching book. It’s soggy around the edges from their adventure in the creek, but he doesn’t seem disappointed. Actually, despite the carry-on between Eddie and Richie, all of them are radiating peace. Contentment. 

It’s nice. 

So, Bill is entirely calm when his heart rate spikes in time to a chase. He feels a burst of cruel humour that isn’t his own and sees the fat boy running through different eyes. 

(Pennywise sees the world in a way that human sense can’t comprehend, with colours and patterns that are invisible to human eyes, that hurt to try and understand.

Bill has seen himself through Pennywise’s gaze. He _shines_.)

His visions of Pennywise are getting stronger by the day. Every time they touch and kiss and <strike>fuck</strike>(_mate_) make love their link grows stronger, more powerful. Sometimes Bill thinks it’s going to take him over entirely, devour his heart and mind and leave him as nothing on his own. 

Most of the time, he doesn’t think it’s a bad thing. 

He rolls onto his belly, propping his chin on his folded arms. “Do yuh-you w-wuh-want to go suh-wimming tomorrow?”

“At the quarry?” Richie asks. “Sure.”

“Do you know how filthy that water is?” Eddie grumbles. 

“Better than here,” Stan argues, waving a hand at the sewer opening and the ever-present stream of grey water gushing from its mouth. Eddie grimaces, but he nods. 

There’s a sharp thud behind Bill’s breastbone; his vision swims as he catches a glimpse of the blond boy launching himself backwards off the kissing bridge and tumbles backwards down the bank. There’s a blaze of pain and hatred that isn’t his own, and he gasps from the strength of it. For a split-second Bill loathes him, this boy he’s never met, as he watches him scramble to his feet and flee into the trees, heading towards the Barrens. 

“Bill? You okay?”

“Yeah,” he breathes. “Juh-jjj-huh. Hah. C-cramp.” He rubs his calf as if to prove it, and his friends let it go, believing him in an instant. 

He feels the numb rush of fear and panic before he hears the boy; before the stranger he hates and hungers for collapses to his hands and knees in the creek. 

“Jesus Christ!” Richie yelps. “What the hell happened to you?!”

“Is he dying? He looks like he’s dying,” Stan says, scrambling to his feet. 

Bill pushes himself up, looking down at the wounds that Pennywise left, deep gouges on the boy’s belly - not quite enough to disembowel him. The kid is turning stark white under the ruddy flush of exertion, and his eyes are wide with panic. He’s going into shock.

Bill knows he should feel more than he does. He should be horrified, edging into panic just like Eddie and Stan and Richie. He should be terrified. But just as with his father, there’s nothing. 

Nothing but (_hunger and insult and rage at this petty thing for lashing out, for escaping. For running to Billy - the only one with the power to save him_) a sense of indignation that this kid somehow managed to hit Pennywise hard enough to wind it in that vital moment. He shoves his dislike down and helps Richie pull the kid to his feet, out of the water and onto the bank. 

“Th-there was a monster,” the kid pants. “On the bridge. In the - in the library. It was. It chased. I-“

“Dude, calm down. You’re, like, bleeding to death,” Richie says. 

“We need to get help,” Eddie says. “Medicine. An ambulance. Anything. Holy shit.”

Bill senses Pennywise’s retreat, its resentment lingering like a cloud in his mind. 

“C-come on,” he says. “Wuh-we should t-take him to the f-f-f“

“The pharmacy, Bill, Jesus,” Richie mutters. “Right. Come on, man.”

...

It’s not Bill’s idea, in the end, to invite both the fat kid - Ben, his name is - and Beverley Marsh swimming with them the next day. Richie blurts out the invitation in between ordering Eddie to suck Ben’s wound. Their argument pitches into the hysterical, and Ben - smiling shyly - accepts. So does Beverley. 

Bill’s eyes catch on the graffiti on the wall behind them, on the face of his lover as it appears amongst the paintings, and shudders as a wave of resentment rolls down his spine. 

(_Not fair, Billy._)

He sucks in a breath and offers Ben and Beverley a smile each, and he says nothing - nothing to object to their presence or to welcome them. He’s not sure what to do, really. He barely knows Beverley: he kissed her once in a school play, but hasn’t spoken to her since. Ben is new in town and Bill doesn’t know him at all; he hasn’t even seen him before today. But Ben’s talk of a monster on the loose, the injuries he has to back up his claim...they’ve caught the attention of his friends, and Bill knows he doesn’t stand a chance of distracting them. 

He glances again to the wall, to painted yellow eyes and a twisted smile, and he feels a sense of foreboding. 

He wishes he was still grounded. 

...

He presses a kiss to Pennywise’s chest, roughly where he knows Ben managed to land a kick. Pennywise is cold to the touch and oddly still beneath him, its gaze fixed on his face, eyes flickering between blue and orange. It’s been strangely passive all evening, even during sex; it let Bill push it down onto its back instead of riding him as it usually does. The change of position had been nice, but now it bothers Bill more than anything. He can feel its disquiet in the back of his mind. Pennywise doesn’t want to hurt him by eating a new friend, but the loss of its prey is still irritating it. The injury, for all that it seems to have hurt Bill more than Pennywise, is just an added insult. 

Bill stretches out alongside it. They’re naked, twisted in sheets he knows he’s going to have to wash before his parents wake up (again). He doesn’t mind the blood and the semen, the sweat and the saliva, but he knows that his mother would. But laundry is a task for the morning; Pennywise is here now, and infinitely more important. 

He props his head up on Pennywise’s chest. It looks odd like this, to human eyes. Thinner than it probably should be, and with that same oddly hard texture that belongs to a being less humanoid in nature. It has no nipples and no navel, which Bill has found bizarre the first time he’d noticed. It’s smooth and blank from the neck down, save for the shadowy gradiation where its pale arms darken to clawed, void-black hands. One of those hands is draped across his shoulders, cradling the base of his neck. Every so often, an elongated pinkie finger dips lower, tracing over the faded scar that Pennywise gave him at their first meeting. 

It feels domestic, lazing together like this. It feels horribly perfect in every sense, and Bill’s trying to hide it, but his heart is already breaking knowing that soon the cycle will come to an end and Pennywise will hibernate once more. He doesn’t know how long it will be - Pennywise itself has very little concept of time in what it considers to be fleeting, human measurements. 

(_More aware. This is not what hunts used to be. Longer. Billy needs attention and there’s mating to be done before sleep comes again. _

_Hunts used to be a blink awake. A blink and a shift back to this world and away from the dreamlands. Brief and bloody. It does not want to sleep again. Not this time. _)

However long it turns out to be, it will be too long. 

“Yuh-you ssstill wuh-ant to eat him, right?” he asks. 

Pennywise nods. “Yes,” it says, its voice coming out as a soft hiss. “I’ll make him float. I’ll feast on his flesh and leave his bones for the worms.”

“Bones are c-crunchy, though,” Bill says.

Pennywise hums. Its eyes flicker back to blue and a soft, unearthly titter spills from its lips. Its hunger spills across their link, and Bill feels his stomach rumble. 

“Can I eat him, Billy?” Pennywise asks. 

It doesn’t need to ask. Not really. Bill is well aware which of them is the stronger. It’s being _nice_, asking his permission like this. 

“Shuh-sure,” he says. 

Pennywise is generous enough, giving in to Bill‘s requests for safety for his mother and Georgie and all of his friends. Bill can be generous too. For all that Ben seems nice enough, he’s too new an acquaintance. Bill doesn’t know him, and his loyalty, his heart, his everything belong to Pennywise now. 

It’s too late. 

He feels no guilt when Pennywise smiles. Not even guilt that he doesn’t feel guilty. All he feels is satisfaction and pride - and pleasure as Pennywise guides him up into another kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> P.S. Please don't kill me, Ben fans.


	5. Curse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back and ready to take another swandive into hell ~
> 
> The posting schedule of every two weeks is now resumed. Thank you for your patience, you wonderful monsters.

There’s a bandage over Ben’s belly when he joins them at the quarry. It’s stark white against the pale expanse of his skin, and Bill only glances at it once before peering over the edge of the cliff and down into the green-blue water. Looking at Ben means he can feel the lingering traces of Pennywise’s anger, its satisfaction that Bill didn’t object to its plans. He watches Richie spit - Losers’ tradition - and follows the arc of his saliva down into the water below. He copies it. The others follow suit, Eddie arguing that mass is more important as his offering splatters onto the cliff-edge; Richie’s voice squeaking as he argues. 

There’s no malice between them. No hatred except that which clings like a shadow to the edges of Bill’s mind. 

The question of who goes first has them all hesitating. They gaze uncomfortably down at the water below. It’s blue-green, still and murky, and it’s impossible to see the bottom. The cliff seems too high, all of a sudden, and Bill wishes they’d climbed further down. 

“I’ll go,” says a voice, and they turn as one to see Beverley Marsh already undoing the buttons of her dress, exposing plain cotton underwear and pale skin. Bill blinks as she looks up at them, flashing a grin. She likes the attention, the surprise at her actions. 

“Sissies,” she says, and she’s laughing at them. Her dress tumbles to the ground as she races past them, throwing herself from the edge of the cliff and into the water below. 

“What the fuck?” Richie yelps as she passes them. 

Bill shoots him a smile, takes a step towards the edge, and leaps. 

...

(_Billy’s father goes to work with a flask of coffee and a lunch in a brown paper bag like he always does. He greets his colleagues in a jovial voice and works through the morning, poring over plans for renovations and expansions. He takes a long lunch and uses it to fuck his secretary in a motel room halfway down the road to Salem’s Lot. _

_There’s a spark of life in the woman’s belly that makes Billy sad in ways that Pennywise doesn’t understand and Billy can’t explain. Billy’s father hates it, but he hasn’t told her to terminate it even though he wants to. He strokes her hair instead and promises that he’ll leave his wife for her. _

_He glimpses the red of a balloon through the gap in the motel room curtain, and Pennywise drools at the resultant spike of unease._

_He doesn’t know yet, but hurting Billy was his last mistake._)

...

There’s something oddly Pennywise-like about Bev at this angle, something about the curl of dark copper hair at the back of her neck and the pale slant of her cheekbones. Bill looks away from her before she can catch him staring, missing his bondmate fiercely. He wishes Pennywise was here. Wishes it was just the two of them. Wishes they could do something like go swimming together. 

(_Why not, Billy?_)

_We can?_

The image that flashes through his brain is strong enough to make his vision black out. For a moment, his friends are gone and Pennywise is there, its long legs wrapped around his waist and its hands curling around his shoulders and twisting in his hair. He can feel its weight in his arms and the cold grasp of its body around his cock, and it’s so real that when he’s broken out of their fantasy by a splash he almost feels like crying. 

The others are diving under the surface looking for something that brushed against Richie’s foot. Bill dives down with them, willing his erection to die, only to spot a dark shadow swimming through the murky water. 

“It’s a turtle,” he says, once he breaks the surface. 

The sense of anger, of fear, that slides down his spine isn’t his own. _Pennywise..._

(_Universes spew endlessly across the void, expanding in the dark; stars spin out, their planets dancing in their gravity. Lesser gods emerge from dust and atoms, fighting and fucking and consuming each other as galaxies collide. Through it all, the <strike>not-</strike>_turtle swims, its gaping maw vomiting creation into the dark.

Maturin creates with ease, but cannot destroy without the aid of lesser beings. I am opposite, a devourer of worlds. Maturin creates without thought, but cannot stomach my destruction. 

He is moving, Billy. Spiralling closer. The -) 

A flash of ovoid pillars cracking, crumbling. Bill sucks in a breath and swipes wet hair out of his face, trying to temper his sudden fear and the surge of absolute hatred that runs through him. 

He turns his mind to other things: to Eddie and Richie and the kiss they shared under the water where no one could see; to Bev and the bubbling lightness of her thoughts, to the first flutterings of attraction she feels; to Ben and his jealousy and need to prove himself. Their thoughts are simple things, less overpowering, and they help Bill find his way back to himself. 

It’s getting harder. So much harder to drag himself away from Pennywise and the mindscape they share. 

The water is suddenly too cold. It prickles on his skin and he shivers uncontrollably. He starts swimming for the rocks, and doesn’t care when the others follow him. He just wants out. He wants Pennywise, to see that his mate is fine. 

(_Yes, Billy. Hunting._) 

He glimpses his father and a woman getting into a car, and feels nothing except a vague curiosity about Pennywise’s plans. He’s never seen Pennywise hunt an adult before, and his growing apathy towards his father’s existence means that any discomfort he should have felt is swallowed up by anticipation for what is going to happen. 

(_Small humans are easier to lure away, to season with tasty, tasty fear. It has devoured worlds, galaxies, but small humans are the sweetest prey._)

He feels warmer by the time he climbs out, and he perches on a boulder to dry. The others join him, Beverley stretching out in front of them all to sun herself, hiding her eyes behind large sunglasses. Bill studies her - tries not to be too obvious. Her momentary similarity to Pennywise is gone, but he still can’t help but compare them. They’re both pale, but Pennywise is unnaturally so - it’s hard and flat and strangely shaped without any dips or curves, while humans are so much softer. 

Bill averts his gaze. He knows which he prefers. 

... 

When Beverley rolls over, the others shift, embarrassed, looking away from her. Bill, leaning back on his hands with his face turned up to the sky and images of Pennywise’s hunt floating through his mind, smiles at the frantic racing of their thoughts - the half-formed fantasies and the urgent needs to be elsewhere. He feels Bev’s amusement, her pleasure at being found beautiful, and then her curiosity when Richie dives into Ben’s backpack looking for a distraction and pulls out a folder. It’s filled with pictures, dated with Ben’s scratchy handwriting, and newspaper clippings of missing people and mangled bodies. 

“What the hell?” Richie asks. Bill pulls the folder closer, flipping through pages. He feels a stirring of curiosity that isn’t his own; amusement at human confusion over previous hunts. 

He runs his fingers over the photo of a burned-down nightclub, tracing over the number of deaths. It makes him pause: the number is low, too low, given that Pennywise is capable of devouring entire galaxies. Everything it’s done in Derry seems as though it’s on a small scale. Too small. 

_Why? Are you eating enough?_

(_Yes, Billy._) 

“It’s interesting,” Ben says. “Derry’s...not like any town I’ve been in before. People die or disappear six times the national average. And that’s just grownups. Kids are worse. Way, way worse.” 

There’s a silence that follows his words that itches at Bill’s mind. He can sense his friends’ disquiet; hear their thoughts as they begin to suspect that something’s wrong - more wrong than the serial killer that the police have told them is hunting the children of Derry. 

“I’ve got more stuff at home if you want to see,” Ben offers. 

They do, almost. It’s a morbid, reluctant sort of curiosity that gets them moving. They dress in near silence, gathering their clothes and bikes and making their way into town. It’s only when they’re on their way that the doubt begins to set in: Ben is just a bit too weird for them, a bit too much of a loner with too much time on his hands. 

“Who the hell even collects this stuff?” 

“I don’t know, Richie, maybe he wants to make friends.” 

Bill hides his smile at their confusion and discomfort. He wants to see what Ben has collected; wants to know for sure how much he suspects Pennywise really exists. All he can really sense from him on the surface, without pushing deeper, is a mild feeling of happiness that he’s at the centre of so much attention. Like Beverley earlier, he likes being the focus of the group. 

Bill lets his mind drift just enough to see deeper. Not so deep that he loses track of the road and where he’s going, but enough to see more. The world blurs out a little at the edges, but he glimpses Beverley Marsh, pretty and smiling, her signature the only one in a yearbook. He sees himself as Ben sees him, not shining the way he looks to Pennywise, but taller and stronger and handsome, and he feels the stirring of Ben’s jealousy when he sees Beverley watching him through Ben’s eyes. He hadn’t even noticed her looking, back at the quarry. 

Oh. 

Ben’s doing this for Beverley. Not the Losers, although he likes their attention too, but because he wants Beverley to pay attention to him, to think he’s smarter than Bill is. He wants her to _look at him_. That Bill isn’t interested is apparently irrelevant, because Ben can’t imagine a world where people _don’t_ find Beverley Marsh beautiful. 

Bill slides back to himself when they come to a stop in front of a small house with a neat lawn. He throws Silver down with the rest of the bikes and follows his friends up Ben’s yard to the house. It has that strange look of a house barely lived in, and there’s an old woman in the living room who has the blue-gleaming eyes of a ghost. Bill glances at her once and turns away. He learned soon after they started appearing to him that it was best to ignore them unless he wanted their attention on him. He’s more invested in the minds of the living and in the worlds he sees through Pennywise’s dreams. 

The woman doesn’t see him glancing at her. She stares blankly out of the window, her glowing eyes fixed on something only she has ever seen; her jaw slack and gaping, her blackened tongue drooping out from between her shrivelled lips. 

He lags behind as he follows Ben and the others up the stairs with Beverley trailing after him. She’d waited for him, her thoughts fizzing with budding fondness. Ben is, he has to admit, horribly right about her. 

(_She **cannot** have you._) 

He gives her a faint smile before he climbs the stairs. 

_I don’t want her._

(_**My** Billy. If she tries, she dies._) 

_Okay._

... 

_Carla Morton goes missing. Her dismembered body is found later that day, dumped at the edge of the Barrens, where the Kenduskeag curves down away from the town and flows towards the sea. Stabbed to death, her autopsy reveals traces of semen and a positive test for pregnancy. _

... 

Ben’s room is...terrifying, in a way. Derry’s bloody history is mapped out in photocopied documents and monotone photographs across all four walls. He hasn’t connected anything with red string, but it’s a close thing.

“What’s that?” Richie asks, pointing at one of the documents. 

“Derry town charter,” Ben replies. 

“Huh, nerd alert,” Richie scoffs in reply. He’s not wrong, but Ben’s mind fizzes with low-grade anger. Bill slides away from the rest of them, letting his gaze travel over the mess scattered across Ben’s desk. There are homework assignments all jumbled up with slides and statistics on mysterious deaths. He begins to pick through them, listening to the others’ thoughts; listening for any suspicions they might have. 

He doesn’t want them to know about Pennywise. As much as he loves his bondmate, he wants to keep it secret as much as he can. It’s too complicated to explain. 

“Actually,” Ben says, “it’s really interesting. Derry started as a beaver trapping colony -“ 

“Still is! Am I right, boys?” 

Stan slaps Richie’s attempt at a high five away. His eyes are fixed on the wall. 

“Ninety seven people signed the charter to found Derry township,” Ben continues, and even though his voice doesn’t give anything away, his mind smarts with irritation. He doesn’t like being interrupted, and he’s not fond of Richie’s bravado - he doesn’t realise that it’s just a front to help keep the rest of them to notice his relationship with Eddie. It’s obnoxious, but it works: Bill is the only one who knows, and that’s because he can hear their thoughts. 

“Then one winter, they all vanished,” Ben continues. “People thought they were attacked, that it was Indians, but there was no evidence. Just a trail of bloody clothes leading to the well house.” 

Bill’s skin prickles. As the others exclaim over the number of deaths, he lifts up a slide and discovers a map of Derry. From the corner of his eye, he sees one of Ben’s printed pictures twist, and he knows Pennywise is watching them again. 

“Where’s the well house?” Stan asks. 

“Don’t know. Somewhere in town, I guess.” 

(_A dust-filled wreck of a house with uneven floorboards and moth eaten furniture. Billy on a sofa beneath it, head tipped back and eyes shining up at it._) 

Oh. 

He feels a surge of protectiveness. If Ben thinks to project this slide over a map of the sewers, he’ll find the house on Niebolt Street in a second, and that would take him straight to Pennywise’s lair. In one deft movement, Bill slips the slide into his pocket and moves to join the others, his eyes picking out Pennywise in every image, right there for them all to see if they cared to look (they don’t, they’re too freaked out). Ben isn’t paying attention either, too distracted by Beverley’s sudden amusement. He pleads silently for her not to tell anyone even as a brief snippet of music flashes through his head. Bill hides his grin. New Kids on the Block? 

It’s Eddie, out of all of them, who asks the question they’ve all wanted to since the quarry; Eddie who puts his disquiet into actual words. 

“So, what are you going to do with all this stuff?” he asks. “None of the grownups would believe it has anything to do with the missing kids. So what are you going to do with it?” 

Ben shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. It’s, bizarrely, a question he wasn’t expecting. 

“We need to stop it,” Beverley says, stepping up behind them. “This thing, whatever it is, we need to stop it before it kills us too. We need to find the well house.” 

... 

Bill should have known there was more than one map. 


	6. Niebolt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Porn ~

He should have known there was another map.

He should have known that Pennywise – that the _house_ \- wouldn’t take kindly to an influx of strangers.

He should have known – 

“I’m not _real_ enough for you, Billy?” 

He should have known never to say that to Richie.

Pennywise’s eyes are gleaming red and orange at it twists around to look at him. Behind it, on the floor, Eddie is cradling a broken arm but is otherwise unharmed. He’s staring up at Pennywise in absolute terror, and the force of it makes Bill’s head ache. 

“Not _real_ enough?”

He opens his mouth. He wants to apologise, but the words stick to his tongue. Pennywise turns completely, it’s movements nothing human as it straightens up to the full height of its current form. Its gloves split open, claws flexing; its face too is splitting apart along one of the cheetah-like stripes on its cheek, revealing the void-black chitin of its <strike>not-</strike>spider-form. The wave of anger, of disappointment and confusion hits him like a truck. It’s so violent that his eyes blur. He chokes on his apology, unable to voice it and unable to make it felt in the face of Pennywise’s fury. 

He’d been trying to get Richie out of the illusions. He hadn’t meant - 

He spots movement from the corner of his eye: a blur of red and white and brown. Beverley. He sees the spike in her hands, hears her thoughts and her yell. He jerks forward, reaching out. 

“Don’t!” is all he manages before she stabs the spike through the side of Pennywise’s skull. Pain tears through his own brain, impossibly intense. There’s a ringing in his ears, and in the instant before a blinding flare of light turns the world black, Bill sees Pennywise’s face twist into a snarl of fangs and blood and chitin. 

He collapses. 

...

He’s not alone when he wakes up. He’s cold and slightly damp, and he moves instinctively closer to the body holding him with long arms. His sense of smell wakes next: popcorn and mould, cotton candy and blood. Pennywise. He relaxes, purses his lips and presses a kiss to whatever part of his lover he’s pressed up against. 

He keeps his eyes closed. There’s a throbbing pressure behind his eyeballs and his head aches in a way he’s never experienced before. 

Claws scratch across the top of his spine. The brush of Pennywise’s consciousness against his own is oddly gentle, given that the last time they were looking at each other, Pennywise seemed ready to eat him. He nudges back. Sends his apologies through the link between them, let’s Pennywise see - not for the first time - just how much it means to him. He can’t help the tears that seep out from under his lashes, and he grips tighter to the decaying satin that covers Pennywise’s body. 

“I love you,” he whispers, and he doesn’t even notice the lack of stutter. 

He feels Pennywise prise his thoughts apart, his memories of the day, starting when Ben told the rest of them that he’d figured out where the Well House was; that he wanted to go there. He lets Pennywise see his stuttered objections and the way he was overruled. Beverley had been firmly on Ben’s side, and curiosity had won out for the others. They hadn’t believed - not really; not until they’d gone inside. He pushes this forward, lets Pennywise examine his interactions with Richie. Let’s it see the fun that Bill was having with its illusions before it got too much for his friends. He lets it see Richie’s panic, the love he feels for Eddie, the fear Richie had felt when they heard Eddie screaming in pain.

(The house on Niebolt Street is old and decaying and the floor had given way under Eddie’s feet, ancient boards cracking and disintegrating after decades of neglect. 

Pennywise kept its promise.)

“I love you,” Bill whispers again, and he lets Pennywise feel it, pushing the tangled mess of his emotions towards the link they share. “I’m s-sorry.”

Claws drag gently up the back of his neck, sliding into the fine hair at the base of his skull. The gesture makes his skin prickle and the throbbing behind his eyes intensifies for a moment before subsiding into a dull ache. He squints his eyes open, lifting his head slightly to look at Pennywise’s face. His lover’s expression is unreadable, something not helped by the cracks still running up the length of its face, webbing out from the injuries to its head. He watches as Pennywise’s eyes lighten to blue once more, and feels its anger fade into something warmer, though just as fierce. He slips one hand up between them to stroke his fingers along the length of a cheetah stripe, testing the cracks in Pennywise’s skin. 

“Are yuh-you okay?” he asks. 

Pennywise nods. “Billy collapsed,” it says. 

Bill blinks. He nods and shifts, cuddling closer. “Wuh-why?” he asks. “I-it f-fuh-felt like B-Bev s-s—suh-tabbed me.”

(_This is why._)

Pennywise’s voice rings in his mind and his ears as loudly as if it had opened its mouth to talk. The link between them is wide open, hiding nothing, and Bill can feel his mind slotting into the jagged edges of Pennywise’s psyche. It’s so simple to do now; far easier than it had been in the beginning. He’s felt it getting easier all this time and never put much thought into what side effects there might be besides his increasing blood-thirst. He presses forward, sliding into Pennywise’s mind to see what it knows; it’s overwhelming as it always is, the shift between perceptions. Pennywise sees and smells and experiences things so much more powerfully, its memories span billions of years, and its life is a trail of experiences that are beyond human comprehension. 

He travels through its mind past stars and galaxies, through endless universes expanding outwards into the void (_macroverse _). He watches lesser gods tie their lives to even lesser beings: the messenger to his dreamer, storm gods to fair mortals. He watches bonds form, but nothing so strong as the one that anchors them together; that keeps him from losing his mind in the face of Pennywise’s inhumanity. 

(_They are less so their ties are less. Only the turtle can rival it, but he won’t - he won’t. Not until he starts to seek destruction._)

Bill withdraws, blinking rapidly. His head aches again, but a gentle scrape of claws across his scalp soothes the pain. The last images he’d received, those towering pillars again, linger in his thoughts as conversations he didn’t know they’d had settle back into place: memories of dreams that left his pillow bloody and music piping in his dreams. 

Maturin and Azha- and Pennywise; creation and destruction. If either chooses to take the opposite role, they need help from a lesser being. Him, for example. 

He looks up at the star-blue glitter of Pennywise’s eyes. 

“Wuh-where are thuh-they?” he asks. 

...

Beneath the trailer is a tunnel down into the dark. Deep below Derry, it opens up into a cavern; huge spikes of rock forming a crater at its centre, the site of an ancient impact. It’s damp and cold - and so dark that Bill has to slip into Pennywise’s mind to use its eyes as his own. What he sees is incredible. Scattered around the edges of the cavern, stretching away into the dark, are clusters of pillars - those same ones that have haunted his dreams lately, and his thoughts. They’re leaning together, secured in place with anchor-lines of thick silk. He walks towards the nearest grouping, entranced; he can feel Pennywise at his back, watching his every move. It will kill him if he hurts them, bond or not, but Bill can’t even imagine causing them harm. 

He lifts a hand and presses it to one soft, leathery shell. He reaches out with his mind and senses the jumbled instincts of the creature forming within. His child, one of hundreds. 

“Wuh-when wuh-ill they huh-hatch?” he asks. 

“When they’re ready to.”

Pennywise doesn’t know any more than he does, the experience being new to it as well. Bill swallows, looking up at the towering egg, beyond it to the multitude of its siblings. His children. _Their_ children. Each and every one of them carefully positioned and secured. There’s a lump in his throat and a stinging in his eyes that he struggles to swallow around. Words are jammed in his mouth, stuck there unable to emerge. 

(_They’ll devour worlds. They’ll slip between universes like shadows and feast on the turtle’s careless creations. Our children will be beautiful, Billy. A new race of gods._)

_Yes._

He lets his hand fall and takes a step back into Pennywise’s embrace. He twists to look up at it, at the blue of its eyes and the deadlights dancing in its pupils. He tilts his head back, parting his lips and leaning up. Pennywise meets him halfway, kissing him hungrily; his acceptance of their eggs - their _parenthood_ \- has pleased it. Its hands curl around his hips, claws catching on his T-shirt. He can taste blood on its lips and he opens his mouth wider, kisses deeper, chases after it. He moans as Pennywise’s tongue curls around his own, and his fingers curl into fists as he’s pulled up and in against his lover’s body. 

He’s hard in his jeans. He pushes himself against Pennywise’s thigh, groans at the friction. Its claws slide lower, dipping into the back of his pants, scratching gently over sensitive skin. He gasps into it, and that’s all it takes for Pennywise to lift him off his feet and carry him back across the cavern to the ring of raised stone at its centre. He’s lowered down onto the cold, hard earth, and Pennywise straddles his hips to keep him there, its hands dropping to the fastenings of his jeans. 

Bill pushes himself up, tugs at the mouldering costume that Pennywise wears only for the fabric to dissolve away to nothing. He reaches for Pennywise instead: his fingers skim over pale chitin, slip down between its thighs to the opening there. It’s wet: the tongue-like appendage unfurls as he strokes along it, winds down around his fingers and his wrist. Borrowing Pennywise’s eyesight, he can see it: void-black and glistening. He rubs it between his thumb and forefinger and feels a jolt of pleasure that isn’t his own. Pennywise’s hips jerk, and it leans down over him and pushes him back onto the ground. It kisses him hard and Bill grins into it. He keeps rubbing. 

Pennywise growls against him, shoving his jeans down over his hips and thighs. It’s less careful with his underwear; that is shredded off his body in seconds, releasing his cock to the cold air. Bill gasps. He moans again as the tendril wrapped around his wrist slides away to wind around his prick instead. It ripples around him before pulling him deep inside Pennywise as his lover lowers itself onto his lap. Bill groans, reaches for Pennywise’s hips with fingers still dripping with ichor. Black fluid smears over pale chitin where he grasps at it; he starts to thrust in time with the rippling movements of Pennywise’s body. It leans down to kiss him again, wet and filthy, nipping at his lips with sharp teeth and growling as it draws blood. 

Pennywise shudders as Bill comes into it, hissing strange words low under its breath as it milks him through his climax. He doesn’t understand it, but he knows the meaning - can feel it reverberating through their bond. He strokes up Pennywise’s side, presses kisses to every part of it he can reach. 

Looking over its shoulder, he doesn’t see the cavern. He sees the vast darkness of space-beyond-space, lit with distant universes. The deadlights dance and whirl and spindly legs weave gentle webs for their eggs from gas and atoms. He can see, he realises, the true expanse of Pennywise’s true form, and besides a faint ringing in his ears, he feels no pain from it. There’s no blood dripping from his ears or nose, no sensation of his mind fracturing. It’s just light and void and piping music. 

It’s beautiful. Beautiful and deadly, like stars exploding. A living event horizon. A god<strike>dess</strike> of destruction - mad and violent and lovely - bound to him as deeply as possible. 

(_I told Billy he was mine. Mine for always and for ever, through time and space and death._)

_Humans don’t live forever._

(_You’re dead already, Billy. Everything that lives has already breathed its last. The years of your mortal existence are a petty construct. You know that._)

He does know that. He knows because Pennywise’s idea of pillow-talk stays into metaphysics and philosophy too often, and his lover has _opinions_ about linear time that don’t quite mesh with human experience. He knows because he’s seen enough of Pennywise’s existence to know that his lover is everywhere simultaneously, not just in Derry; that it exists beyond the boundaries of the known universe (and finds the idea that humanity knows anything about the universe laughable) and that it is in every other universe that has ever come into being. 

It slides out of his arms, walking across the chamber on long, bare feet. He twists to watch it as it crosses the cavern towards a bare patch of wall; its body folds outward as it moves, two legs becoming eight, becoming hundreds; shifting and twisting until it’s wearing the monstrous spider-like form he’s only ever glimpsed before. Eyes blink open, glittering like stars, watching him back. He waggles his fingers at it before raising them to his lips and flicking his tongue out to taste the remnants of ichor still clinging to his skin. It’s as sweet as cotton candy, but with a sickly aftertaste that clings like mould to his palate. 

He sucks a finger into his mouth, humming idly. Across the room, Pennywise busies itself with bringing another cluster of eggs into the world. It’s nothing like watching birth on a nature documentary or in that weird ‘wonders of the body’ thing that Mr Kellsworth made them watch in gym class last year. For a start, Pennywise isn’t in pain: Bill would be able to feel it if it was. It seems completely painless, actually, as Pennywise opens up the mass of its abdomen and uses spindly legs to draw out egg after egg, winding primordial silk around each one. 

Bill pushes himself up, kicks away his jeans and the tattered remains of his underwear, and walks closer. He winds his way through a labyrinth of legs, running his hands over sharp spines. The deadlights flicker and gleam, brighter than he’s ever seen them, and he stands leaning against one of Pennywise’s legs to watch as another egg is retrieved. 

(Behind the dancing glow, he can see more of them. Row after row still yet to be fertilised; they stretch back into a body that spans dimensions.)

He keeps watching, silent, until Pennywise is done. It shifts back into its favoured form - still naked - and winds long arms around his shoulders. 

“Wuh-wuh-ill the tuh-turtle t-t-try to-huh. To kill thuh-them?” he asks. 

“Yes,” Pennywise says, and it comes out as a snarl, its eyes flickering red with hate the way they always do when the turtle is mentioned. “You too, if he gets the chance.”

“Yuh-you wuh-won’t let it,” he says. 

It’s faith: just as he knows that Pennywise will kill his father for hitting him, he knows that it will kill its brother if the turtle attempts to do the same. It’s trust and love and soft, warm things that he never thought he’d know this way; that he knows Pennywise wasn’t expecting either. 

He stretches out a hand to run his fingertips along a silken strand of stardust, and he grins, turning away to press his face into where Pennywise’s sternum should be. The cold is starting to get to him, sinking down to his bones, but there’s a buoyant feeling behind his ribs that’s making him smile uncontrollably. He shivers and presses closer for comfort, even though he knows Pennywise doesn’t generate body heat, and he giggles softly. 

“I love you,” he says again. “And thuh-them.”

Pennywise makes a soft, familiar noise low in its throat and it cards clawed fingers through his hair. 

“Keeping you, Billy,” it says. 

“Fuh-for-forever,” he promises. 

If there’s a way to keep it, he’ll find it. Even if it means leaving this world behind forever. 

...

_Sharon Denbrough opens her son’s door. Bill is lying still in his bed, breathing slow and deep in his sleep. There’s a smile on his face and what looks like ink caught under his fingernails and in the corners of his mouth. He’s been writing again, she thinks, and she glances towards the typewriter at his desk. There aren’t any new pages that she can see, but it’s not out of character for him to hide things. Especially now. _

_She doesn’t see the star-blue glow of alien eyes in the corner by his wardrobe, daring her to come closer. _

_Down the hall, Georgie isn’t quite as restful. He tosses and turns and mutters in his sleep. Some kind of nightmare, she thinks, and she smoothes his hair away from his sweaty forehead. _

_“Not Billy,” he whimpers, still sleeping. “No. No, not. Not Billy. I won’t.”_

_She presses a kiss to his brow. “Bill’s just fine,” she says. “I promise.”_

_But there’s a strange foreboding that slides like a knife between her ribs that has her crossing the hall again. Bill has shifted slightly in his sleep, his ink-stained hand is pressed to his mouth and she can hear the wet sucking noise from her place by the door. She lingers, uncomfortable for a reason she doesn’t understand - Bill’s asleep, she hasn’t caught him doing anything odd - before backing away and closing the door. _

_Her boys are asleep. They’re safe. She can wait until the morning to tell them that their father has been arrested. _


	7. Quarry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas, Losers. You're the best bunch of monster-lovers I've ever encountered. Thank you all so much for your ongoing support <3
> 
> Please note that in addition to the usual canon-based disregard for human life, sheer WTF-ery, and an authorial descent into gibbering madness, this chapter contains references to domestic violence. _Please_ reaquaint yourselves with the tags. If this is at all triggering for you, just skip the bit where Georgie appears (it's the last part of the chapter. See Georgie, _skip_.)
> 
> See you in 2020, darlings.

Bill floats. 

He’s naked and warm, summer sunlight bathing his chest and belly. The water of the quarry is still cold, but it’s not so bad that it bothers him. It’s peaceful, just him and Pennywise, who is keeping its promise that they could swim together. 

Beneath the surface of the water, a tentacle snatches up a turtle and deposits it into a fang-lined maw, erasing its existence. Pennywise prefers human meat by far, but its hatred of its brother extends to the smaller beings made in Maturin’s image. Bill smiles at the echo of the crunch of shell in his mouth, the taste of blood; he closes his eyes and lets himself drift. 

A tentacle winds itself around his ankle, another around his waist. The tip of it ventures between his thighs to nudge at his hole and the sensitive place behind his balls. He opens his eyes. Pennywise is watching him from two feet away, mostly submerged. Only its eyes and hair are visible, soaked copper strands clinging to its domed forehead. 

It had chosen a different form for the day: a teenager a little older than Bill with much the same features as the clown: red hair and a full mouth. It looks male above the waist; below, any pretence at humanity unfurled into something closer to an octopus as soon as they entered the water.

He remembers the images it gave him when he first suggested the idea of swimming together, and his cock twitches with interest. He lets the tentacles pull him closer, down into the water. Pennywise doesn’t try to drown him, never submerges his face, but draws him close, winding tentacles around him until every inch of Bill is surrounded by it. Arms slip around his shoulders as Pennywise shifts, and a more familiar tentacle - slicker than the others - winds around his prick. 

He moans. He kisses his mate as Pennywise tightens its grip on him, long and languid. The rippling around his cock makes his belly tighten and his hands clench into fists. He wants so desperately to touch Pennywise, to caress it, to grasp its hips and drag it closer still, but its tentacles are keeping his hands behind his back. Pennywise laughs at him, sharp teeth drawing blood from his lips. One of its tentacles nudges between his legs again, the tip of it pressing into him. Bill gasps; he tries to jerk away before he makes himself relax. The tentacle wiggles deeper, stretching him open. It’s slick with water and oddly heavy; it doesn’t hurt as much as it feels uncomfortable and a little strange - to have his bondmate inside of him at the same time as he is inside of it. Not unpleasant. He finds himself pushing his hips back instinctively, pressing it deeper into him before thrusting forward into the cold grasp of Pennywise’s body. 

More tentacles anchor him in place, holding him steady as Pennywise thrusts into him and ripples around him. It kisses along his jaw to his throat, scraping his skin with its teeth. He lets his head tip back and he stares up at the sky unseeing, letting pleasure overtake him. 

He can feel echoes of a pleasure that isn’t his. Pennywise is _enjoying_ this. He’s felt as such before, but it seems stronger now. More vibrant. 

He shudders as his orgasm tears from him, crying out as the tentacle in his arse twists and flexes against a spot that seems to prolong it, making him come even harder. Grey spots dance at the edges of his vision, and he whines softly as Pennywise withdraws. It’s happy, sated for now. Bill takes advantage of loosening tentacles to wrap his arms around its neck and hold it close. 

A very human-like arm curls around him, familiar claws scraping over his hip. The real thing is so much better than just a fantasy. 

...

They’re found later. Bill senses their thoughts first, jumbled and incoherent with a strange kind of panic. Richie and Eddie aren’t expecting to find him, even though they’ve already been to his house and been told that he’s here. They think he’s dead. 

_He collapsed. That thing killed him. Shit shit shit, what do we do if he’s not here?_

He gleans from them that Beverley wanted to go back and find him; had tried to insist on it, but had been overruled by the others’ pain and fear. He sees himself collapse through their eyes, the way his eyes had rolled back in his head and Pennywise’s vicious scream of rage. He sees Pennywise lashing out, nearly gutting Ben, and the Losers escaping in the confusion. 

He can feel their guilt, heavy as a rock as it weighs down on them. 

They think he’s been eaten like the other kids. They haven’t heard, yet, that his father was taken in for questioning last night. 

He sighs and sits up, reaching for his underwear. He refuses to be naked in while talking about any of this. Pennywise lifts its head and narrows its eyes. It’s been basking in the sunlight, nearly asleep; it’s already been awake longer this time than in previous cycles, too preoccupied with Bill and mating and the eggs. Tiredness is beginning to set in again, and Bill knows that the time they have left is short. 

(_Billy will sleep with me. Will float and dream and stay forever._)

_I’m still human._

(_And a **dreamer**._)

Once he’s almost decent, Bill reaches out to take Pennywise’s hand in his own. Black claws lace through his fingers automatically, squeezing gently. It otherwise hasn’t bothered to move: Bill’s insistence that it doesn’t eat his friends has rendered them almost completely irrelevant, apparently, and Pennywise has very little concept of things like embarrassment. It doesn’t see the point. It remains almost lifelessly still, face down on a boulder. Basking. Shifting only enough to raise blackened spines of chitin towards the sun for brief moments before letting them sink back into its body once more. 

Its mind is less calm than its appearance. There is, though it tries to hide it, the slightest doubt that the Losers would be enough to pull Bill away from it, back to the human world. It’s a level of insecurity completely at odds with the power Pennywise has, but something Bill understands: the unknown, the things Pennywise talks about sometimes, are terrifying to him, so why would friendship - just as unfamiliar to Pennywise - not be frightening to it?

(_Philosophical little creature._)

The only problem he has, really, is how to explain all of this, given that he doesn’t really understand it himself sometimes. By the time Richie and Eddie come into view, Bill still has no idea how he’s going to phrase anything. Pennywise, still draped out next to him, is less than helpful. Is actively unhelpful, in fact, in that the most it’s done since they realised they weren’t alone, has been to grow two extra legs - black and spidery and each of them longer than Bill’s body. It looks, even to Bill’s eyes, mildly disturbing - something he supposes is the point. It wants to intimidate, even if it won’t hurt anyone. It wants them to be afraid, even just a little, to remind itself that it has that power. 

Eddie’s left arm is in a cast. His right hand is entwined with Richie’s: they hadn’t thought they’d actually find him so they haven’t bothered to hide themselves the way they usually would. They don’t drag themselves apart either, not immediately. They’re frozen, horrified, by the sight of Pennywise behind him. 

“Huh-hey,” Bill says. 

“Dude, what the fuck?!” Richie bursts out. His mouth snaps shut as Pennywise lifts its head and stares at him, and he jerks Eddie closer as if to defend him. 

Eddie has never needed defending. “‘Hey?’ _‘Hey?’_ What do you mean, ‘hey’?” he demands. “You collapsed! You - you were kidnapped! Holy shit, why are you not dead?” He glances at Richie and hisses in an undertone that they can all hear. “Why isn’t he dead?”

“Billy’s not for eating,” Pennywise says, completely tactless. It lowers its head back down onto the boulder and stretches out a dark ridge of chitin down the length of its spine. Its spider legs twitch slightly. 

“What. The. Fuck,” Richie says again, utterly deadpan. “Bill?”

There’s no way to explain this. None. Their minds are a cacophony of absolute horror and confusion, and Bill is suddenly very aware that anything he could possibly say is going to make things worse. So much worse. They aren’t going to understand; they can’t see the world the way he does, let alone the way Pennywise does. They can’t hear thoughts or see ghosts or feel the malice that lingers in peoples’ hearts.

(_They can’t make people forget, either._)

_What?_

“Wuh-we mmmet last yuh-year,” Bill says. “Wuh-when B-Bowers wuh-ent mmmissing.”

“I remember,” Eddie says. “You had that cut on your arm. You said you didn’t know what happened, though.”

“P-Puh-Peh-nny-wuh-wise huh-happened,” he says, and feels heat bloom in his cheeks as he butchers his mate’s chosen name. 

Pennywise squeezes his fingers gently. 

“Shit,” Eddie says. “You - you knew this whole time?”

Bill shakes his head. “Wuh-we fuh-forget wuh-hen it sleeps,” he says. “Like a b-bad dream.”

Pennywise makes a vaguely disgruntled noise and digs its claws into the back of his hand. Not hard enough to draw blood, but just enough to warn. 

(_Billy enjoys dreaming about me._)

_I do. I’ve always done._

It’s true: even the dreams he shared with Pennywise and forgot during its nap after they first met. He remembers them now, and he loves those memories dearly. Loves that he and Pennywise shared this bond even then. Loves that they knew each other and that just knowing him was enough to spare Georgie’s life. 

He loves everything about Pennywise. 

“That’s so fucked up,” Richie says. “So, so yesterday? You knew we were going to be attacked like that?”

“Uh-I,” Bill manages. 

“Eddie broke his arm!” Richie shouts. “He almost died! You almost died! Ben got turned into hamburger - again! And you knew about it?!”

“I didn’t hurt any of you,” Pennywise snaps, lifting its head again. Bill glances over in time to see its mouth stretching inhumanly wide, displaying row upon row of razor-sharp teeth and the eerie glow of the deadlights behind them. “Billy said not to hurt his friends.”

Richie jerks back in terror, pulling Eddie with him. Fear, however, is not enough to stop him from making a disbelieving noise, but Eddie shakes his head and Bill feels the beginnings of something like understanding form. 

“I fell through the floor,” he says. “It didn’t touch me.”

“Ben?” Richie asks, but there’s a twist to his mouth that says he already knows the answer. 

“Wuh-we aren’t f-f-friends,” Bill says. “Nnn huh.” He closes his eyes and tries to conjure up the words to explain. 

“He hates you,” Eddie says. “A bit. Well, before the whole evil clown thing. Probably more now.”

“Yeah,” Bill says, sighing. 

“Dude, if you’re letting your killer clown eat the people who hate you, your Dad’s fucked,” Richie says. 

It’s bad that his friends have noticed that much. Bill grimaces. “Huh-he w-was arrested last night,” he says. 

He knows what the implication is. He knew the second his mother, grey-faced and red-eyed, told him and Georgie after breakfast. Eddie and Richie know too, know that Bill is going to let his father take the fall for Pennywise’s kills. He watches the realisation dawn in their eyes, hears the buzzing of their thoughts. 

They sit slowly, hands still entwined. They haven’t even noticed that they’re doing it - too distracted by their fear and their horror and their confusion. Richie, lucky for him, can’t imagine a world where he could hate a parent enough to have them labelled a serial killer. Eddie can. His mind is racing, thinking about all the times he’s seen Bill with his father and the misery in his eyes; about the drugs the pharmacist’s daughter told him were fakes; about his mother’s wrath and her determination to keep him as far away from the Losers - from Richie - as possible. 

(He snuck out. Climbing out of a window with a broken arm was probably crazy, but not as crazy as entering the Niebolt House. His mom’s going to try and ground him for the rest of forever, but he doesn’t care.)

Eddie hates his mother in a way that Bill is deeply familiar with. He loves her too, in ways that he doesn’t understand quite so much; his father never loved him or Georgie at all, while Mrs K loves Eddie in all the wrong ways. 

“This is so fucked up,” Richie whispers. He’s looking at Bill like he’s never seen him before, and Bill knows the second that what he’s looking at filters through his brain. Bill, still mostly nude, his fingers entwined with long, black claws; Pennywise actually naked, one yellow eye watching them warily. He hears it as the tableau they’re presenting locks in place. Feels the ripple of emotion that it creates. 

“Dude, are you fucking the murder clown?!”

...

Bill arrives back at his house and wheels Silver into the garage. His father’s car is parked next to his workbench, and he shoots it a wary look as he leans Silver up against the wall. He can’t hear shouting; he can’t hear anything. He secures his bike and enters the house. 

He sees Georgie first. His brother is pale and wide-eyed. There are tears on the verge of falling, just as there had been at breakfast, but there’s a different feel to Georgie’s fear. At breakfast he’d been worried about their father, about what would happen on them if he went to prison. Now, his fear is fresher. More urgent. He grabs Bill’s wrist and tries to drag him back out to the garage. He’s thinking of getting Bill back on his bike, getting him out. 

“That you, B-B-Billy?” comes their father’s voice from down the hall. He’s slurring his words. Bill sees a flash of broken beer bottles in Georgie’s mind and a bruise darkening his mother’s eye. He can feel her fear hanging sick and heavy in the air. 

“G-go t-to Richie’s,” Bill says. “Fuh-phone the p-p-police.”

“He’s going to hurt you again,” Georgie whispers. 

(_No he **won’t**._)

“Go!” Bill hisses, and Georgie nods. He squirms out of Bill’s grasp and races past him into the garage. Bill closes the door after him, leans back against it, his heart hammering. Through the wood, he hears Georgie grab his bike. Hears him go and feels his presence move further away. 

He releases a soft breath and lifts his head. He sets his jaw and turns in the direction of the living room; lets fear and rage and hate guide him down the hall. 

_“I need you,”_ he whispers, his voice echoing his thoughts perfectly. 

He enters the living room. Finds his mother cowering and his father standing over her, anger splotching his cheeks red. Behind him, over his shoulder, a crimson balloon floats into existence, drifting slowly in an invisible wind. Bill feels a grin twist his face and he reaches with his mind to bind his senses to Pennywise’s. The world blurs slightly as his vision expands and the tang of fear in the air makes his mouth water. 

“Uh-I’m huh-home,” he says.


	8. Float

Shadows twist. Bill stands in front of his father and lifts his chin to meet his gaze. His father’s eyes are hazy and bloodshot with alcohol, and there’s a red flush to his nose that spreads in blotches across his cheeks. His mother is on the floor, one hand over her eye. She stares up at Bill, wild with panic as his father starts move towards him. She grabs for his father’s ankles, tries to stop him, but gets kicked for her effort. 

“Stay the fuck down, bitch,” his father snarls. 

Bill steps forward. His heartbeat is slowing. He doesn’t feel fear anymore. He smiles, feels it stretch across his face until it’s just a little too wide. 

His father falters. Behind him, a single red balloon is bobbing close to the ceiling, caught in a breeze that touches nothing else. 

Bill steps forward again. In his mind he can feel Pennywise’s glee, its lust for blood. He had asked, once, not to be told what it planned for his father. He’s been curious ever since, becoming more so as the hostility at home has increased, but he knows now - as his smile widens further, quite against his will - that he’s going to play a major part in it. 

His father stops moving. He’s staring at Bill like there’s something wrong with him. His mother hasn’t noticed, she’s curled moaning around her battered ribs. 

The red balloon drifts closer. 

(_Bang._)

It pops. Shadows stream out of it, stretching out across Bill’s vision and warping the world around them. The familiar stench of the sewer fills his nose, and cold water splashes around his ankles, and they’re on Pennywise’s turf now. His mate is _there_, towering up over his father’s shoulders. Its mouth is opening slowly, splitting along the lines of its cheetah-striped makeup. Rows upon rows of fangs, backlit by the deadlights, emerge, folding outwards to envelop its face. 

“What- what the fuck?” his father asks. He’s staring down at Bill, at the sewer water soaking into their jeans. He’s beginning to panic. All the rage Bill has sensed from him earlier has been replaced by bafflement. By the beginnings of fear. 

“Yuh-you sh-shouldn’t huh-huh-have hit mmme,” Bill says. 

“Shut the fuck up,” his father snaps. “Stop fucking smiling, f-f-freak.”

Bill doesn’t. He smiles wider, smiles until his jaw aches and every single one of his teeth are bared. 

(_Pretty, vicious Billy_) Pennywise coos. There’s a warm flare of <strike>fondness</strike> (_love_) and a burst of humour. Pennywise wants to see him rip his father’s throat out. The image of him dripping in gore surprises Bill so much that he snaps out of his strange aggression. He licks his lips. He can practically taste the blood already. 

Over his father’s shoulder, Pennywise has finished unfurling into something indescribable. Its long, spindly legs have filled the tunnel, blocking the way out; what little remains clown-shaped hangs almost lifelessly from the immense, spidery lower half. Its head has opened into a vast expanse of teeth and swirling orange light, hypnotic and terrifying. 

“T-turn around,” Bill says. His voice echoes in the confined space, and under it, he can hear the high, girlish rasp that is Pennywise. His mate speaking through him, crooning through his mouth. He laughs, unable to stop it. 

“Turn around!” Pennywise shouts, using Bill’s mouth to do it. 

His father staggers, wide-eyed and pale. He stumbles back from Bill, sloshing water up around him. He turns and -

He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t do anything. He freezes, trying to see what it is bearing down on him, only for his mind to warp and crumble under its impossibility. His body jerks, crumpling against the side of the tunnel. Bill can hear his breath coming in uneven pants; a high whine escaping his father’s lips. He sounds like some kind of injured animal. A beaten dog.

He’s still alive, but his mind is gone. Bill can sense it: where there was once a constant stream of hate and disappointment and frustrated rage, there’s nothing but a jagged-edged emptiness. Everything that makes his father his father – all of his thoughts and feelings and that bright blue spark of _life_ \- is gone. He’s dead, but breathing. A puppet. Everything he was has been burned away by the madness that is the deadlights.

This is Pennywise’s plan.

He didn’t realise until they were at the quarry just how little time his mate has left in the waking world. He hadn’t realised up until that point what Pennywise’s plan was: he hadn’t wanted to. He hasn’t deliberately looked. He’d asked it not to tell him, to keep his father’s fate a surprise, but over the last few weeks he’s still caught glimpses of Pennywise stalking him; caught snatches of his mate’s glee and bloodlust. He’d been expecting his father to die, at first – Pennywise had been angry enough – but this is <strike>worse</strike>better. 

His father is going to be put in prison - a serial killer found guilty of Pennywise’s crimes - and his mother and Georgie will leave Derry. When they do, they’ll forget him and move on; his friends will drift apart and away. Bill will be lost to history: a footnote in his father’s case file. 

This is Pennywise’s plan: to steal him from humanity, from earth, and frame his father for his death along with all the others. For the missing kids and his father’s mistress, whose fear had tasted so sweet as Pennywise had sliced open her throat while wearing his father’s face. And Pennywise will keep him, then, beyond space and time. All to itself.

Bill can see it, see himself: floating, his body perfectly preserved in the orange glow of the deadlights, cradled tenderly at the heart of a nebula of spidery legs and seething tentacles. Always dreaming; never dying. Eternally himself, wandering through distant universes with Pennywise along side him. 

Bill doesn’t even realise that he’s crying when he nods his head. He wants it. Wants this – the forever that Pennywise has promised him. “D-do it,” he says, and his voice is his own again. 

He steps past his father’s slumped form and reaches out to press his hand to one of Pennywise’s chitinous legs. His palm sliced open on one of the blade-like barbs, but he doesn’t flinch. He tilts his head back, looks straight up into the dancing glow of the deadlights and lets Pennywise read his consent from his very soul. 

“I want this,” he whispers. 

...

Their dinner and the uneasy silence that had settled over it is by a pounding on the door. Richie blinks. There’s someone outside and they’re shouting for help in a high, strained voice. 

He lowers his fork. His father’s already on his feet, arming himself with the pistol he keeps in the bureau, and his mom wraps her arms around him to keep him following while his dad heads down the hallway to investigate. He hears the door open, hears sobbing gasps and more high babbling and watches the shadows on the wall move as his father guides a shaking Georgie Denbrough into the house. 

He’d been dreaming about Bill earlier, Richie realises, starting slightly in his mother’s grasp. When he was napping upstairs before dinner. It wasn’t in the same way he dreams about Eddie, but something cold and evil that slides out of his thoughts as soon as he tries to remember it. 

“Where’s Bill?” he asks. 

**Dead,** his thoughts whisper. **The clown got him in that house. Dragged him down into the dark and ate him. Your Bill’s dead, dead, dead.**

Except...he’d spoken to Bill this afternoon, hadn’t he? He’d spoken to Bill and met his girlfriend - a red-head who wasn’t Beverley Marsh. Eddie had been there, down by the quarry. They’d walked slowly, holding hands in the shelter of the woods; Bill hadn’t said anything when he’d seen them together, and he must have seen them, because Richie can remember feeling the warmth of Eddie’s hand in his own as they’d stood there and spoken to him and his girlfriend and - 

_What had been wrong with her? With - something about her face? Her eyes? Her smile?_

“Dad,” Georgie says. “He was so angry when he came home and he started drinking and he - he - he was so mad. He hit mom. He hit her real bad, like he did Billy that time.”

Shit. He’d known - they’d all known - that Bill’s dad had taken his escapades on Halloween out of his hide. Bill had been moving stiffly for weeks afterwards, and him, Stan and Eddie had ended up lifting some bruise cream from the pharmacy for him. It hadn’t seemed to help much. At least, it hadn’t stopped Bill from getting quieter and quieter, weirder and more spaced-out, like he wasn’t entirely with them half the time - or was seeing through them. 

“He’s gonna kill him,” Georgie whimpers. There are tears tracking down his pale face and he’s trembling slightly. “He - he’s gonna kill Billy.”

**Bill’s already dead.**

The words are on the tip of his tongue, but he bites them back. His mother releases him, dashing across the dining room to pull Georgie into her arms instead. Richie meets his father’s gaze over the tops of their heads, and he thinks his father must see something in his face because he pulls his coat on and heads for the door. 

“Call the cops, Maggie,” he says, shoving his feet into his shoes. 

Richie wants to call after him as he heads for the door, wants to shout that it’s pointless, that Bill’s dead already, but he doesn’t. He can’t. He stands frozen as Georgie sobs into his mother’s shoulder. 

_Bill isn’t dead. He can’t be._

**Yet.**

_There had been something wrong with the girl Bill was with. There had been something wrong with Bill - he’s been weird forever, since they were kids and he’d tell people what they were thinking - but there was something **wrong**. Something..._

_The house on Niebolt. Eddie fell through the floor and broke his arm, and Ben got nearly fucking impaled by a loose railing, but hadn’t something happened to Bill too?_

He forces himself to move. Makes himself walk across the room and wrap his arms around Georgie, pulling the kid close and out of his mother’s arms so that she can get the phone. She ruffles his hair. There’s a tightness to her mouth and a shine to her eyes that says she should be crying, but when she lifts the phone to her ear, her voice is as steady as it’s always been. 

“Police,” she tells the operator, “I want to report -“ 

He doesn’t catch the rest. She vanished into the kitchen, leaving him with Georgie in the hall. He rubs his hands over thin shoulders and rests his chin on the top of Georgie’s head. His pyjama shirt is getting wet, tears spreading through the thin fabric, making it cling to his skin. He doesn’t say anything. For once, there’s nothing to say - he doesn’t think Georgie’s going to appreciate any of his voices right now, and he thinks he’ll appreciate that nagging feeling in the back of Richie’s head even less. The feeling that says that none of this can really be happening. 

He takes a slow, deep breath and closes his eyes. He wishes Eddie was here with him. Eddie always seems to know what to do - he panics and hyperventilates, but he always gets through it. He’s so much smarter than Richie is, so much braver. He’d know what’s going on. He’d know what happened this afternoon. 

**You know what happened.**

_No._

**You know. You saw it. You saw _it_.**

_He saw a red-headed girl sprawled out next to Bill by the quarry, lying naked on her belly in the sun. He saw their hands linked: her black <strike>claws</strike> nails bold against the back of Bill’s hand. She’d looked up at them with <strike>yellow</strike> blue eyes and smiled a little bit too wide <strike>flickering orange light spilling from between her lips</strike>. _

_It had just been a trick of the light. Just a trick of the <strike>**dead**</strike>light<strike>**s**</strike>. A trick - _

“The clown,” he whispers. 

He doesn’t realise he’s said it out loud until Georgie shifts in his arms, pulling away slightly and looking up at him with wide eyes. 

“What?” he asks. 

“The - it’s nothing, it’s okay. Just me being a trash-mouth like always.”

“You said ‘the clown’,” Georgie says. He’s frowning, his voice distant. “You mean Billy’s clown? The one from the sewer?”

Something cold settles in Richie’s stomach. He pushes Georgie away enough to be able to look down at him properly. “You - you know about the clown?” he asks. 

The kid’s a mess. His dad’s a psycho and his brother may or may not be dead already. This isn’t the time. It isn’t. It - 

**It is.**

Georgie’s face twists up like he’s trying to remember something he doesn’t really want to. “I was out playing,” he says slowly, “when Billy was sick. My boat went into the sewer and the - the clown gave it back. He said Billy could come visit again.”

Again? **Again.** Bowers, Belch and Victor Criss had all gone missing last summer, hadn’t they? And Bill, this afternoon...

_ <strike>Dude, are you fucking the murder-clown?</strike> _

**He fed them to it.**

“The clown...” he says. “Let you go?”

Georgie nods. 

“Have -“ Richie licks his lips and wishes desperately that he was smarter, that he was braver. That Eddie was with him. That he could just be a normal kid and enjoy his summer with his friends and his boyfriend. He takes a deep breath. 

“Have you seen the clown since then, Georgie?”

For a second he doesn’t recognise the expression on Georgie’s face. It takes him a moment to register that it’s because he’s never seen anyone so scared before; not Eddie nor Stan nor Bev nor Ben, even after they went into Niebolt. Not even Georgie earlier when he came in babbling about murder. It’s a slow kind of terror that creeps into Georgie’s face, draining what little colour he had left. Richie looks down at him with mounting dread. 

_<strike>”Dude, are</strike> you fuck<strike>ing the</strike> murder<strike>-clown?”</strike>_

“B-Billy doesn’t know,” he says. “I think I did, but he made me forget. He made me forget, but -“

“But what, Georgie?”

_<strike>”Dude, </strike>are you fuck<strike>ing the</strike> murder-clown?”_

“I saw it in his room.”

_Black spines fanned out from it’s back, shifting and flaring in the sun as spidery legs twitched and stretched. Orange light flowed out from between its teeth as it promised to never hurt them, to never hurt Billy’s friends. _

_Bill’s hand was clasped between its claws. He hadn’t been afraid of it; had never been afraid of it. _

_Richie had seen him in Niebolt. He’d thought the severed heads and the black ooze that burned over the floor were funny. Bill’s become good at hiding things - at hiding how strange he is - but Richie’s known him all his life and he knows when Bill’s trying not to burst out laughing. He’d been having fun until the clown had turned on him, had started ranting about the advice Bill had given Richie; until Bev had shoved a metal rail through the clown’s temple and Bill’s body had dropped like some kind of discarded puppet._

_He and Eddie had taken their time walking to the quarry because they’d already watched Bill die. _

_They hadn’t expected to see him alive._

“Bill - he’s not gonna die,” he says. 

**He's already dead. The clown destroyed him. It took him and twisted him and -**

“He’s going to be okay, Georgie.”

**Richard.**

“The clown won’t let your dad hurt him.”

Georgie blinks. He looks...disbelieving and unsure, as if what they’re talking about is already fading from his memory. He ducks closer, pressing his face into Richie’s chest and Richie instinctively tightens his grip, holding Georgie close as him mom emerges from the kitchen. 

She offers him a tight smile. He smiles back shakily. 

Bill’s going to be fine. His dad won’t be. Bill’s safe. Protected. The - 

_He can’t remember. There’s something he can’t remember. Something important. Right?_

Bill’s going to be fine. 

...

A car pulls up outside of the apartment block. It’s occupant doesn’t get out, doesn’t look up. Blank eyes stare straight ahead. Unseeing. A knife rests on the passenger seat. The blood on the blade has already soaked into the upholstery; it’ll stain. He will wait until the lights go out before he moves. He’ll climb up the fire escape and find the girl. 

_“He snuck out! He just snuck out! He just - he wanted to be with his girlfriend, it’s nothing you didn’t do. Oh God. Oh God, Billy. Zach, what have you done? –” _

There’s only one girl Bill ever hung out with. (_Only one who looks at him too long and too sweet. Billy is **mine**._)

Four floors up, Beverley Marsh keeps her eyes closed and pretends to sleep as her father stands over her. He’s breathing heavily, his hand jerking roughly around his cock. 

In two hours, she’ll be an orphan. 

...

**Benjamin. Benjamin Hanscom.**

**There is something you need to remember. **


	9. Web

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. Before lockdown, university was awful and nearly destroyed me. After lockdown, I found out that my executive dysfunction kicks me in the ass if I don't have 37 things to do simultaneously, and nearly destroyed me. 
> 
> I have written this chapter four times. _Oh, well_.
> 
> Wear masks, maintain social distance, and support Black Lives Matter.

_Alvin Marsh is beaten to death with a claw hammer in his living room. His daughter, Beverley Marsh, goes missing._

…

Ben Hanscom, napping on top of his notes for his private history project, wakes up. He **remembers**.

His hand flies to his belly, to the long <strike>**claw marks**</strike> gouges in his flesh. He can **remember** Beverley raising a rusted spike above her head, remember her stabbing a clown through the skull. He can **remember** Bill collapsing onto the floor; the clown’s tooth-filled snarl of pain and rage; the white-hot flash of pain as the clown lashed out. 

He can **remember** Bill being the only dissenting voice when he’d first suggested checking out the Niebolt House. He’d stuttered something about summer and having fun, but Ben had won their curiosity. Ben had _won_ \- and Bill had looked so panicked when the clown rounded on him in that dilapidated kitchen. 

_“I’m not **real** enough for you, Billy?”_

It had sounded so offended. He **remembers** now: the sinking feeling when he realised that they knew each other; that the clown had been so offended because it was _hurt_. How...how could he forget that?

**It makes you forget. Every time it returns to its slumber, the people of Derry forget the pain it caused, the deaths.**

Ben blinks, tilting his head. The thought had felt different somehow, like it originated outside of his own mind, but...it makes sense. Everything he’s found has been public record, but no one ever talks about it. None of the Losers had known anything before he’d told them, and they’d lived in Derry all their lives. 

**Except for him.** Except for Bill. **He feeds it. Chooses sacrifices.**

Ben sifts through piles of newspaper articles. There’s one...one that doesn’t fit. The sheriff’s son and his friends. **Yes.** They were <strike>too early to fit the pattern</strike> **the start of it**. Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, Reginald Huggins. They’d been reported missing the summer before Patrick Hockstetter, and by all accounts, they’d been bullies - the exact kind of bullies who would mock Bill Denbrough for his stammer. 

He looks down at their black and white photographs and he **knows**. Some kind of **instinct** is telling him that these three, not Hockstetter, were the first. The first victims of this cycle. 

**Yes.**

Bill led them to it.

**YES.**

None of the others are going to believe him. They’re too close, and Beverley is too...infatuated. He kind of gets it: Bill is tall and handsome and even though he’s apparently some kind of psycho-murderer, there’s something oddly appealing about him. None of the others are going to believe him, but...he has to try. 

**William Denbrough must die. _It_ must die.**

He has to try. 

**They must die. _They must_, before -**

…

_Sharon Denbrough curls her hands around a cup of weak tea. She’s shaking and her eyes are red as she denies all knowledge of her husband’s whereabouts. Case files are beginning to be looked at in more detail: Zach Denbrough’s movements over the last year and a half traced and re-traced. _

_Sheriff Bowers slips his son’s cold-case into the stack of files. The whole town knows Henry and his friends hated the Denbrough kid, after all._

_“He’s got Billy,” Sharon Denbrough sobs. “I tried to stop him. I tried, I – I don’t know where they are.”_

…

There’s something wrong about dragging Georgie with them, but Richie doesn’t feel comfortable letting the kid out of his sight. Not that he particularly wants to venture back to the Niebolt House either; not when Bill and Beverley are missing and his mind is nagging at him to _stay away_. But he goes because the others demand it, and he brings Georgie because his parents asked him to keep an eye on him when they’re at work and Mrs Denbrough’s at the police station.

Bill’s dad’s a serial killer, the police think. They think he’s been killing kids right back to when Henry Bowers and his gang went missing. Richie remembers helping Eddie smear stolen bruise cream on Bill’s back after Halloween, and he remembers that three little girls went missing that night. Did Bill know? Did he see something?

<strike>He knows already that Bill knew everything, but memories are easily stolen. Time is passing and sleep is nearing and -</strike>

They throw their bikes down on the brown lawn in front of the Niebolt House. It looks worse now than it did a few days ago. _Ben_ looks worse, even as he turns to face them. His cheeks are flushed and there’s sweat beading on his brow and gathering under his arms; there’s blood spotting through the bandage on his middle where he was <strike>clawed open</strike> almost gutted by a railing the last time they were here. The glint in his eyes doesn’t look quite right. It seems to flicker an odd, greenish-blue in the sunlight, and he doesn’t look…sane.

He thinks Bill’s Dad brought Beverley here. No, he thinks the _real killer_ brought Beverley here – a clown with copper hair, who <strike>lazed on a rock and promised not to hurt Billy’s friends</strike> killed Bill too, days ago, and who wants to kill all of them as well.

“It wants to kill _everything_,” Ben says. “It wakes up every twenty-seven years and eats people and destroys things. It’s behind the Black Spot. It killed those kids at the Ironworks. It wakes up and it kills and it sleeps and – and one day, it’s going to destroy the whole world.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Stan says. “If this thing is real, if it’s going to destroy the world…why is it here? Why start in Derry? It’s _Derry_.”

Georgie’s fingers tighten around the hem of Richie’s shirt. He hasn’t let go since last night, when he’d slipped out of the guest room and curled up in Richie’s bed instead. Richie had woken up in the middle of the night after some weird nightmare to find him cuddled close, gripping onto his pyjama shirt like it was the only anchor he’d had left. 

“I don’t know,” Ben says. “I don’t know why _here_, but I do know that we’re the only ones who know. We’re the only ones who can stop it. The only ones who can save Beverley before she ends up like Bill.”

Georgie’s breath catches, and Richie winds his arm around the younger boy’s shoulders. He catches Eddie watching them out of the corner of his eye, and he grimaces slightly.

They’ve had a secret language for years; something that has only existed for the two of them: a way of communicating that predates the first time Eddie called him an idiot and yanked him down into a kiss. He knows that Eddie feels it too: the doubt seeping in, the heavy coil of fear wrapped around this place. He knows that Eddie dreamed the same thing he did.

_ Stinking cold water slips over the top of Richie’s sneakers. He stares into the dark of Derry’s sewer system and sees lights glimmer off the water - a strange orange that doesn’t match the angle of the sun overhead. _

_There’s a nagging feeling in his gut that this isn’t real, that he’s dreaming again, but he knows with the very core of his being - with everything that he is - that the voice he can hear is real. _

_“Don’t look for me, Richie. I’m fine, I promise.”_

_“If you were Bill, you’d be stuttering,” Richie argues, not taking his eyes off the lights. _

_“No one stutters in their sleep,” Bill argues. Richie frowns, but he supposes he’s got a point. Bill usually does when he decides to speak up. _

_“Do you promise?”_

_“Promise,” Bill replies. “I’m safe. I’m floating. But you won’t, if you come looking. You’ll die.”_

_Richie nods. _

And he knows Eddie remembers that day at the quarry, sitting hand in hand as they talked to Bill and his <strike>clown</strike> girlfriend. The way Bill had been so _alive_ even though he’d <strike>dropped like a rock when Beverley had shoved the spike through the clown’s skull</strike> passed out the day before.

“It killed Bill,” Ben says. He sounds angry, impatient. “It’s going to kill Beverley too!”

_But it…it hadn’t killed Bill, had it? The <strike>girlfriend</strike> clown had picked Bill up after he fell. <strike>She</strike> It had <strike>gutted</strike> lashed out at Ben and stooped to collect Bill from the floor while Ben clutched his belly and screamed, and it had left with Bill. Slipped through a door and vanished into the dark like neither of them existed, and – _

His memory slips. All he knows it that Ben is lying and Georgie’s shaking and Eddie is staring at him, waiting for him to do something. He takes a breath.

“Yeah, no,” he says. “_I’m_ meant to be watching Georgie, and talking about Bill getting killed is _not_ helping. Jesus, Ben, why are you being such a dick?”

Ben starts slightly, as if he hadn’t even noticed Georgie was standing there. Eddie steps closer, coming up on Richie’s other side, backing him as he always would. Stan steps back, away from Ben and the steps leading up to the house.

_“Don’t look for me, Richie.”_

“Beverley’s in there! That thing’s got her, and it’s going to –“

“Shut up!” Georgie shouts. “Shut. Up. Shut up about Billy!” He’s still clinging to Richie’s shirt, tight enough that it’s starting to stretch around the neck. “You don’t know anything!”

Richie feels something cold slide down his spine as Ben stares at them. That strange, greenish glint is growing stronger. He hugs Georgie closer. The urge to run is getting stronger. The blood on the front of Ben’s stomach is spreading, but he doesn’t seem to have noticed that his wound has reopened. 

His own stomach twists. He feels sick. He wants nothing more than to take Eddie and Georgie and run as far and as fast as he can, dragging Stan with them. But he doesn’t think that he can take his eyes off Ben long enough to grab his bike and get them out of there. He’s _scared_. Scared like that day they first came to the Niebolt house, when he saw his own Missing poster, when he saw a room full of clowns and Eddie’s severed head vomiting acid onto the floor. 

<strike>When he realised Bill was having fun watching him panic.</strike>

But this is worse, somehow. It’s a sick sort of fear that settles at the base of his spine, because something’s wrong. So, so _wrong_. Because even if Bill hid his smiles as they raced, screaming, through the house, there had been a confidence that they wouldn’t actually be hurt – at least before Eddie’s screams turned to ones of pain as well as fear. With Ben, there’s none of that. Just a gaping lack of _anything_ except that sickly greenish gleam and a bloodlust that’s…not _quite_ out of character, but close.

He’s been obsessing over this thing since he moved to Derry, and now it’s worse somehow. 

_“Don’t look for me, Richie.”_

_<strike>Dead</strike>Dream-lights on water and Bill’s voice finally free of its stutter. Peace and care and a **warning** all rolled up together._ Bill had known this was coming. He’d _known_.

And he’d warned them.

“We’re not going in there,” Richie says, and his voice doesn’t shake. Eddie’s fingers wrap around his and squeeze. Stan steps back again, joining them. Georgie and the remaining Losers. United. Ben’s face twists into something like a snarl, he steps forward, and the spell is broken. Richie breaks free of Eddie and Georgie and dives for his bike, bringing it up and scrambling to climb on; he scoops Georgie into his arms and deposits him on the handlebars, and he _pedals_. Legs pumping and heart slamming against his ribs, he’s out of breath before he’s halfway back down Niebolt Street, but he doesn’t care. He keeps going. Behind him, he can hear Stan and Eddie, pedalling just as furiously.

“What the fuck was that?” Stan asks.

Richie shakes his head. He doesn’t know.

He can’t remember.

…

Ben watches the Losers pedal off into the distance and thinks he should go after them. It’s _stupid_ to go after the clown alone, he knows that, but it looks like he has to. The clown has Beverley caught in its <strike>**web**</strike> trap. He can’t let it keep her. He has to kill <strike>**William Denbrough**</strike> the clown before it can kill Beverley, and if he has to do it alone then he will.

He turns away. He walks up the steps of the Niebolt House and enters, ignoring the throbbing pain in his belly and the warm wetness soaking into his shirt.

He has to do this. **They must _die_.**

Hidden under his shirt, his father’s old pistol digs uncomfortably into the base of his spine. 

**He only needs to shoot one to kill both.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> P.S. Maturin is a bag of dicks. This is the whole of the law.


End file.
